The Celtics have 20 games left before the All-Star break, 14 of them on the road, starting tonight in Minnesota. It’s the most challenging stretch of the schedule for Boston, which follows the most pillow-soft month of home games and time off. It’s a turnaround worthy of astronaut G-force training and it’s completely unnecessary.
There are two factors involved, and both are things the league needs to address if they want to stop subjecting teams to bizarre scheduling swings: The preseason trip to Abu Dhabi, and the Emirates NBA Cup.
The Celtics are being hit with a double-barrel of bizarreness this year. Because of their preseason trip halfway around the world, coupled with the need for flexibility in tournament scheduling, the NBA pushed off Boston’s customary December Western Conference swing by a month. And to accommodate the potential for being in the NBA Cup elimination rounds, the league had to create a mini-break in the December schedule, pushing games in either direction.
The Celtics wouldn’t have played six games in nine nights like they did to start the month. At least two of those games could easily have been moved into the next week instead. And while a break there seemed to be helpful in terms of managing injuries, we can look back and say it was probably more disruptive than we expected.
Between December 2 and 20, the Celtics had 12 days off and one road game in Washington, one of the shortest flights on Boston’s schedule. That's a lot of time at home. And while that sounds great, as Joe Mazzulla loves to say, too much of anything can be a bad thing.
The road is a place where teams forge a bond. Think about some of the most fun moments we’ve heard about bonding in recent seasons. Kristaps Porzingis and Jaylen Brown became great friends because of a road trip. On the team’s View From The Rafters podcast a year ago, Brown joked “I’ve been sitting on the same seat on the plane for the last four years … KP comes in, walking in, ‘brother, brother, brother, that's my seat.’ Because it was KP, I allowed him to do it.” They sat next to each other ever since, becoming close friends who even carpool to the airport.
The “Bus One Boys” were a thing two seasons ago with Blake Griffin taking the first bus to and from road arenas and bonding with guys like Payton Pritchard, Sam Hauser, and Luke Kornet. Griffin ended up officiating Pritchard’s wedding, proving that lifelong bonds can be built in these situations.
The Celtics have only had two road trips this season, one was a short three-game trip with two games in Charlotte and the other was the Chicago to Orlando jaunt a week ago. Yes they have had practices and games where they're all in the locker room together, but they haven't been forced into the kinds of small spaces where they all just have each other to talk to. A lot of time at home is great, but all that means is after the work is done at the gym, everyone gets into their cars and goes home. They have to do things like take out trash and wipe up spills and deal with crying kids who don’t want to go to sleep. They live normal family lives, just in bigger houses with nicer cars in the garage.
The most important thing in life, to me, is balance. Mazzulla is right about too much of anything being bad. Downtime has to be balanced by work and responsibility. Family time has to be balanced with personal time. And road games have to be balanced with home games. And I know that scheduling is hard and some months will be more home-heavy than others in every NBA season, but Boston’s schedule is ridiculously out of whack. There's no way this December and January slate should exist.
This isn’t just specific to them, either. Every team that is subjected to a Middle East exhibition now have to deal with some version of this schedule. Between that and the tournament, all the league and union have fought for in terms of back-to-backs and reducing travel is getting thrown out the window. Subjecting any team to two opposite conference swings in a month is absurd and unnecessary.
I understand that money is involved. The Emirates NBA Cup brings in a lot of money, including a sponsorship deal on the officials’ jerseys and tourism ads that run during games and in the arena. They want something in return for their money, and the answer is an exhibition between two marquee teams. The NBA is a business and they're chasing every penny they can get.
But there's a price to pay for that. The league is trying to do too much at the same time and it's throwing the schedule into disarray. It would be fine to make that preseason trip if the November and December schedule was easier to manage. Or it would be fine to have the tournament if teams could otherwise have a normal cadence to their season.
To do both is too much. This isn’t what an NBA season should be. The easiest fix is to change the tournament timing to play into the All-Star break somehow. I know money talks, so making the argument to eliminate a ridiculous trip to Abu Dhabi would go nowhere. That's not changing any time soon, so we might as well focus on the thing that can.
However they need to change things, it’s obvious that they do. I’ll concede that the cup is staying if the league will concede that what it’s doing to the schedule is untenable. They need to bring some normal balance back so teams can build and grow like they're supposed to.