There’s no place like home… court in the NBA, and if the league’s Orlando “hub city” plan goes forward we could see each team’s usual home court during games.
According to Yahoo! Sports’ Keith Smith, “the idea of transporting a home floor is on the table” if/when play resumes at Disney’s ESPN Wide World of Sports.
Smith quickly followed up his Tweet with the harsh realities of such a plan. Where would all the courts be stored? Would they really delay games to switch out a court? While nice in theory it would take some Magic (Get it?! Orlando?!) to pull off.
A possible compromise could be to switch out a small portion of floorboards, such as a team logo at centre court or under each basket. This would reduce storage space, speed up the transitions, and (for those of us who especially enjoy how a game is presented visually) break up the monotony of watching every remaining basketball game this season on a generic NBA court design. Maybe it would even help each home team feel just a little more like this is a home game.
The NBA is proposing an eight-game regular season to be held in Orlando involving 22 teams (the top eight in each conference plus six teams overall who are within 6 games of a playoff spot) if play resumes in July for a total of 88 regular season games throughout the league. The NBA Playoffs would then follow if everything works out.
Yes, I know the photo at the top of this post is old. It was the last time I was able to get to an NBA game. I *had* tickets to see the Raptors play the Grizzlies in a glorious battle of the throwbacks in March of this year but, y’know, stuff happened.
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