Weekly NBA Game Thread: Week of Feb. 1st, 2021

Every Monday at 5:00 PM Central this all-purpose thread goes up, and the comments section is where it’s going down. This is your place to discuss all the NBA’s action happening during the week when the Bucks are off-duty.

Pending some sort of cancellation being made public in the intervening hours between my writing this piece and it publishing, the NBA has now gone a whole four days without needing to postpone or cancel a game. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but it is a marked improvement over the every day or every-other-day pace they had been setting even a couple weeks ago.

So, assuming some lessons were learned by the initial rough patch of outbreaks, it appears the league has held on through the first real wave of infection among its players and team staff. They’ve given themselves the flexibility of moving postponed games onto the as-yet-undisclosed second half of the season, though with every postponement the ideal of reaching 72 games played by each team by the tentative May 22nd playoff start date becomes more elusive.

There’s also a chance that the players and staff will be able to obtain vaccines in the near future if the ability to acquire tests for last year’s Bubble are any precedent. The danger won’t be completely eliminated for loved ones, arena employees, or whoever players encounter outside of time with their teams, but it would probably clear the horizon in a big way as the league tries to thread the pandemic needle.

Oh, and for those keeping track at home: The Knicks have fallen into the play-in ninth seed since their hot start to the year. Gravity of reality remains New York’s biggest obstacle to success.