Sports Time Radio

It’s official the NBA season will start on December 22nd and they’re scheduled to play 72 regular season games.

The NBA and it’s players association reached an agreement late Monday night and on Tuesday the NBA Board of Governors unanimously approved the amended agreement to the collective bargaining agreement for the 2020-21 season.

That means the NBA off season is going to be hit and heavy. The draft is just a week away on November 18th. Free agency will start two days after the draft on November 20th and then a little over a month later the season will start.

The salary cap for the 2020-21 season will be $109.1 million dollars and the luxury tax will be $132.6 million dollars. These are the exact same numbers as last season.

There are currently four teams that are in the luxury tax; the Golden State Warriors, the Boston Celtics, the Brooklyn Nets and the Philadelphia 76ers. There is a good chance that the number of teams in the luxury tax will increase because the cap and tax will now remain the same as last season.

We haven’t heard anything from any of the players yet, but it will be interesting to see if any of the players who’s team made a deep run in the playoffs will be taking time off at the beginning of the season. Remember Danny Green of the Los Angeles Lakers was on a podcast and mentioned that he would consider sitting out an entire month if the season started in December. Green also mentioned that LeBron James would probably also take a large amount of time off at the start of the season.

This just doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. We’re talking about professional athletes that are in great shape and for some reason eight weeks isn’t enough time for them to get their bodies ready to play a shortened season. What Green seemed to forget when he was on that podcast is the fact that there are teams that didn’t go to the bubble last season and haven’t played an NBA game in over 200 days. Of course it’s not surprising that he was only thinking about himself. Green also didn’t mention the fact that players pretty much get time off whenever they want it and teams have started calling it “load management”.

What I find interesting is ESPN just laid off 200 employees this week. How many of these layoffs came about because they overpaid to broadcast NBA games? You also have to wonder with the NBA’s television ratings in the tank how ESPN and TNT would feel about star players decide their taking large chunks of the season off. Could that cost more people their jobs at ESPN?

I get that the NBA is a players league, but at some point in time don’t you think they’d want to start being a fans league.

Well we’ve had two awards handed out by Major League Baseball. On Monday they named their Rookie’s of the Year and yesterday they handed out their Manager of the Year awards.

I wasn’t surprised at all when Don Mattingly of the Miami Marlins and Kevin Cash of the Tampa Bay Rays won the Manager of the Year awards for their respective leagues, but when the Rookie of the Year awards where announced I was more surprised with who won.

Devin Williams of the Milwaukee Brewers won the Rookie of the Year in the National League while Kyle Lewis of the Seattle Mariners won the award in the American League.

I guess to be fair I wasn’t totally surprised that Lewis won the award in the American League, but what I was surprised by was that he was a unanimous winner. I thought that Luis Robert of the Chicago White Sox would get some 1st place votes, but he didn’t. Oddly there was even one voter who left Robert completely off his ballot; so I’m guessing that voter didn’t watch a lot of baseball.

As for Williams they kept calling him the Brewers closer, but I guess they didn’t look at his stats because Williams got 0 saves last season. How many closers do you know that don’t get any saves? Maybe he has a future as the Brewers closer, but to call him that now is putting the cart before the horse.

I understand why Williams won this award; he’s an analytic darling and to be fair he did post an ERA of 0.33, but in all honesty did he mean more to the Brewers that Jake Cronenworth did to the San Diego Padres.

Cronenworth ended up in a tie for second place with Alec Bohm of the Philadelphia Phillies in the voting. Williams had 14 1st place votes, 6 2nd place votes and 7 3rd place votes. Cronenworth came in with 6 1st place vote, 12 2nd place votes and 8 3rd place vote while Bohm ended up with 9 1st place votes, 8 2nd place votes and 5 3rd place votes. There are 30 total voters and in case you’re wondering the other 1st place vote went to Tony Gonsolin of the Los Angeles Dodgers.

Do you think that they got the four awards they’ve handed out correct? Or do you think that someone else should’ve won an award?

Today they announce the Cy Young award winners; so who do you winning that award in each league?

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