With the schedule for the 2020-21 NBA season still uncertain, the Olympic dreams that key Milwaukee Bucks players have will be impacted next summer.
As the coronavirus pandemic continues to rage on around the world, there is no shortage of effects it has had on the basketball world at large.
We’ve certainly seen that in the case of the Milwaukee Bucks’ season after they went through the regular season and enjoyed such an extended tear and struggled to recapture that form upon entering the bubble down in Orlando.
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Now as the Bucks sit at home and this year’s NBA Finals continues to unfold, the questions over next season have come front and center and it will only disrupt further keystone events. Take the postponed Olympics in Tokyo, for example.
NBA commissioner Adam Silver recently touched on how the questions facing the 2020-21 season will affect next year’s Olympic games in Tokyo as ESPN’s Tim Bontemps recently relayed:
"“We’ll consider it. I think it’s unlikely, at the end of the day, that, if we start late, we would stop for the Olympics,” Silver said in an interview with NBA TV inside the league’s bubble at Walt Disney World Resort. “Because, as you know, it’s not just a function of stopping for the period in which they are competing over in Tokyo. But they require training camp, and then they require rest afterwards.”"
How will next season pushing into next year’s Olympic games affect the Milwaukee Bucks, you ask? Good question.
After all, the Bucks were quite represented on the international stage during last year’s FIBA World Cup. Bucks players Giannis and Thanasis Antetokounmpo played for Greece while Brook Lopez and Khris Middleton suited up and played for Team USA and Ersan Ilyasova has and continues to be a fixture for Turkey.
Of course, none of those players experienced great runs while in China last year. In fact, Team USA is the lone country of those teams to have already qualified for next year’s round of games in Tokyo, leaving Greece and Turkey having to fight to qualify for the Olympics when those qualifiers will be rescheduled.
With the pathways hard for Greece and Turkey to reach the Olympic stage next summer, Team USA doesn’t hold that same concern. But given the Americans’ struggles under head coach Gregg Popovich and the fact that they finished in sixth place in the competition, Lopez and Middleton’s roster spots wouldn’t have been guaranteed, especially if bigger stars had been available for action.
Now with the hurdles the NBA has in sorting out their schedule for next season, it’s all a moot point anyways.
While it doesn’t affect the Bucks’ goals of winning an NBA championship directly, it affects players like Antetokounmpo on down who desire to win a medal, much less win gold, for their respective countries. Now they’ll likely have one less chance at doing so.