NBA: New 72-game season to begin on 22 December, draft to take place on 18 November

It’s official: The NBA is coming back on 22 December . The NBA and the National Basketball Players Association announced on Monday night that they’ve struck a deal on rules for this coming season, setting the stage for what will be a frenzied few weeks before games resume. Teams will play a 72-game schedule, which will be revealed in the coming weeks. The league said a new system will be used to ensure that the split of basketball-related income continues, one of the many details that had to be collectively bargained with the union because the current agreement between the sides had a great deal of language that needed reworking because of the coronavirus pandemic. Negotiations with free agents will be allowed to begin at 6 pm on Friday, 20 November, with signings permitted starting at 12:01 pm on 22 November — an extraordinarily fast window for the NBA, which typically has about a week spanning the start of talks and the beginning of signings. But with training camps this year beginning 1 December, both sides evidently feel there isn’t a need to draw out the process any longer than necessary. [caption id=“attachment_8887641” align=“alignnone” width=“640”] Teams will play a 72-game schedule, which will be revealed in the coming weeks. . AP[/caption] Many rosters could be considerably reshaped by then, with trades likely to be permissible again in the coming days - the exact details there still being worked out - and the NBA draft set to take place on 18 November. Player and team options likely will be settled around that same time. Free agency starts two days after the draft, with around 100 players set to be unrestricted. The salary cap and tax level will remain unchanged. The cap was $109.14 million this past season, with the tax level at $132,627,000. The real numbers will be affected by the schedule — last year’s numbers were based on the standard 82-game season, a threshold that won’t be reached this year. For the NBA champion Los Angeles Lakers and Eastern Conference champion Miami Heat, it will be the shortest off-season in NBA history — with seven weeks separating the end of the NBA Finals and the planned 1 December start of training camp. But for the eight teams that didn’t make the restart bubble at Walt Disney World in Lake Buena Vista, Florida this summer, it has been a marathon off-season, with none of those teams — Atlanta, Chicago, Cleveland, Charlotte, Golden State, Minnesota, New York, and Detroit — having played since the second week of March. The NBA shut down because of the coronavirus pandemic on 11 March, then took 22 of its 30 teams to Disney to resume the season in July.