The NBA pressed on through a December with rising case counts and saw well over 100 players go into COVID protocols during December, and while the league instituted new rules requiring teams to sign replacements to 10-day contracts on hardship exemptions in order to keep games going even during outbreaks, there were some postponements that could not be avoided.
In total, the NBA has postponed 11 games this season, and it appears the league office spent the time after Christmas crunching the schedule to try and figure out how to reconfigure things to make those games up. On Monday, the league announced the new dates for those 11 games, plus eight games that were moved to facilitate the rescheduled games, as well as a pair of new game times to help give teams the needed time between tipoffs.
The NBA today announced the rescheduling of the 11 games postponed in December due to the impact of the COVID-19 virus. pic.twitter.com/MJyiNesT5P
— NBA Communications (@NBAPR) January 3, 2022
In total, 19 teams are impacted by the 21 rescheduled games, with the Nets, Bulls, and Raptors all having four new game days (with the Nets also having a new game time this Sunday).
Nets: 5
Bulls: 4
Raptors: 4
Hawks: 3
Nuggets: 3
Pelicans: 3
Heat: 2
Spurs: 2
Sixers: 2
Pistons: 2
Suns: 1
Thunder: 1
Rockets: 1
Blazers: 1
Celtics: 1
Wizards: 1
Magic: 1
Warriors: 1
Cavaliers: 1
The NBA will hope that will be the only rescheduling it has to do this season, and hope that the league is through the worst of the surge of cases that saw dozens of games go on with hastily thrown together rosters of players who, sometimes, hadn’t met one another before pregame warmups.