The NBA could shift its calendar permanently due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The NBA has historically operated from October through June, but Steve Koonin recently advocated for a shift to a December-August schedule to largely avoid football.
"Possibly," said Adam Silver when asked by Rachel Nichols of that possibility. "Those are things we're always talking about whether they're executives at ... ESPN or Warner Media, together with our regional sports networks. I will say that the conventional television calendar has changed so much, certainly since I got into this business. Prime time means something very different than it used to now that people in essence carry televisions around with them in their pockets.
"The summer is viewed differently than it was historically from the television standpoint, so regardless of whether we had been going through all this, it's something that the league office together with our teams has been spending a lot of time on. And we have a lot of our team owners who are technologists, media mavens by background, and so it's something that committees of owners and league officials have been working on a lot, especially over the last year or so."
One issue with the NBA calendar overlapping more with the MLB is many teams share regional sports networks with their other sport counterpart.
Kevin O'Connor of The Ringer reports that team executive seem to be warming to the idea of a December start.