National Basketball Association

NBA head coaches open up on game-planning during COVID

Updated Dec. 24, 2021 5:29 p.m. ET

By Ric Bucher
FOX Sports NBA Writer

Each of the 30 NBA head coaches has a style all their own, reflected in everything from how they run a team to how they deal with the media. But there’s a way to get the same reaction from any one of them: Ask whom they’re sure to have available for a particular game.

The uniform reaction? Upturned palms. A shake of the head. And a shrug.

If, that is, the coach is even available to be asked.

U.S. citizens are testing positive for COVID-19 in record numbers, and NBA players and personnel are no exception. With the vast majority of players and personnel having received a COVID-19 vaccine, the strict rules imposed at the start of last season were relaxed, regular testing included.

But anticipating that the Thanksgiving weekend might result in its members being exposed to the latest variant of the virus, the league sent out a memo requesting added precautions be taken by players spending the holiday with families, friends and relatives. That included inviting players to have those in their circle voluntarily tested and requiring players to undergo testing upon their returns.

As a result of the rash of positive tests following the Thanksgiving weekend, a second league memo was released Wednesday that indicated that daily testing will resume for all teams from Dec. 26 to Jan. 9.

Whether it’s due to the post-holiday increase in testing or the virus’ latest variant being more highly contagious, NBA rosters are now being reshaped on a daily basis, not just at an unprecedented rate but also at an unpredictable one. Some teams, such as the Phoenix Suns and Utah Jazz, have barely been impacted; others, such as the Chicago Bulls, Toronto Raptors and Brooklyn Nets, have had to postpone games because they were so abruptly shorthanded.

One league source said the board of governors recently discussed whether to impose another stoppage but agreed to continue playing and, instead, altered the roster rules, giving teams more freedom to sign short-term replacement players.

At the crux of all this turmoil are the head coaches. With games still being played, their primary job remains to create a plan for each particular opponent — ideally, a winning one. That is usually done the day before a game, so certain specifics can be worked on in practice, then fine-tuned or refreshed in the game-day morning shootaround. These days, however, it might be only hours before tipoff when a team finds out whom they have available on the roster or whom they might be facing.

"The regular routine is out the window," Dallas Mavericks coach Jason Kidd said. "It’s just a matter of duct-taping this thing, and win with whatever you’ve got. It has the feel of the beginning. At some point, it becomes just about finishing the game. Start the game. Finish the game. That’s it."

Kidd is referring to the start of the pandemic in early 2020, which led to a three-month stoppage by the league, followed by a truncated resumption inside a strictly controlled compound at Disney’s Magic Kingdom sports complex in Orlando, Florida. That was followed by last season, which began with daily testing, players restricted to working out individually and masks being worn whenever a player wasn’t actively playing. Players were not allowed to leave their hotels, dine in restaurants or interact with anyone beyond their immediate families.

The Mavericks are currently one of the harder hit teams, with a half-dozen players listed as out due to contracting the virus, including All-Star point forward Luka Dončić. They have voluntarily returned to some protocol from last season, including individual workouts for players.

Kidd was an assistant coach with the Los Angeles Lakers the previous two seasons, which meant he was responsible for running only some of those individual workouts. Head coach Frank Vogel had the task of overseeing the workouts, assessing the strengths and weaknesses of new additions to the roster, determining who could help and how, incorporating minutes restrictions for existing players and maybe even taking a peek at who was lining up for the opponent to figure out matchups.

Now all of that is Kidd’s job — and sometimes it has to be done mere hours before the game.

"Normally, we have it all planned out — players' minutes, rotation, matchups — the day before the game," Kidd said. "We call it ‘The Matrix.’ But now we have to wait to do all that because someone could come up positive. We might not have anything set until we go into our team meeting at 4:45 before a game.

"And then you have the in-game stuff — foul trouble, injury, someone has it going, so you let them play a little longer — that could change everything. Right now, there are no matchups because you have to play everybody."

Which aspect of the game — offense or defense — is impacted most by a fluctuating roster is different for almost every team, depending on its style, philosophy and roster composition. The Cleveland Cavaliers have been one of the league’s biggest surprises this season, perhaps in part because they’re only now having players sidelined by the league’s health and safety protocol, but also in part because of how they’re constructed and head coach JB Bickerstaff’s points of emphasis.

"Our message from day one has been we’re not going to be the better individuals," Bickerstaff said. "The only way we’re going to be successful is if we’re the best team on the floor every single night. Our vets bought in to it, and our young guys bought in to it. We’re not a team built on individuals offensively to make us successful. We have seven or eight who average double figures. We’re high in assists. So for us, that won’t change.

"I don’t want to get ahead of myself, but the reason we’ve had the success we’ve had early on is because they bought in to team basketball. No matter who is playing for us, we just plug them into our system. And from one to 15, they’re all schooled in our system. It’s going to be interesting now that we’re having replacement players because they don’t know the ins and outs of our system, so that’s going to make [things] a little more difficult."

As he found out Wednesday.

The Cavs were on a six-game winning streak when they faced the Boston Celtics with, for the first time this season, three of their five starters — Evan Mobley, Jarrett Allen and Isaac Okoro — out due to COVID. Four other players were unavailable for the same reason. The Celtics were in only slightly better shape, with six players (and only one starter, Al Horford) out.

The Cavs never led after the first quarter. That the Celtics were missing players actually didn’t help, either.

"We go into a game, and we’re built on our defense, and our matchups dictate our defense," Bickerstaff said. "That’s what makes our team what it is — getting the matchups that we want and then figuring out coverages off of that. Not knowing who you’re going to put on who or who is playing for the other team, which determines how you’re going to play pick-and-roll, go over or under screens — that’s the difficult part.

"When you go into a game, you’d like to know where the punches are coming from. Our game against Atlanta got postponed, but we go into that game planning for Trae Young being the head of that snake. And then he goes out, and it’s a completely different game plan. It’s a completely different person or scheme that you have to focus on because he’s out."

The Chicago Bulls were one of the first teams to suffer heavy losses due to positive COVID results for key members of the roster. Nikola Vucevic, their burly, 6-foot-10 center, was the first and has not been the same since his seven-game absence after testing positive in early November.

Since then, the Bulls either are, or have been, without their top two stars, Zach LaVine and DeMar DeRozan, for a stretch. Basketball Reference currently has them with two players listed as out and five players listed as day-to-day due to health and safety protocols.

Coach Billy Donovan has stuck with his game-planning routine of presenting what he wants to do in the morning shootaround, but he knows that at any minute, he could get a text that changes everything. As with Kidd, it isn’t until the morning test results are provided a few hours before the game that Donovan knows for sure whom he has available.

"The information I’m getting is, ‘He’s out. He’s in. He’s OK. He’s got an inconclusive test, so we have to test again. He’s out two more days,’" Donovan said. "You meet before shootaround and talk about starters and rotations. You go through shootaround at 10 in the morning and put in a game plan. Suddenly, it’s four o’clock, and you’re told, ‘OK, these two guys are out.' And now you’re scrambling at the arena to come up with a new plan."

Maintaining a cohesive offense has been the biggest challenge for the Bulls.

"Defensively, at least for us, you’re going to have your pick-and roll coverages, your off-the-ball coverages, different post defensive traps, but you’re doing all that stuff through the course of training camp, so guys have an idea already of how that works," Donovan said.

"The offensive part has been a lot more difficult because of what happens when you get guys who are playing with a different rotation or guys are having to play different spots. You’re taking a guy off the bench who has been out of the rotation and have to tell him, ‘You’ve been practicing at this spot, but we need you to play at this spot. Here are the things we’re running on offense. Here are the things you have to know.’ You might slide a guy from the two-guard spot to power forward. Or take a center and say, ‘Hey, we need you to play some power forward here.’ Or your whole second unit changes, and you have to find out what that does to the group’s cohesiveness."

Warriors coach Steve Kerr is just beginning to deal with absences due to COVID. He had three of his top five scorers — Jordan Poole, Andrew Wiggins and Damion Lee — in health and safety protocol entering Thursday night’s game against the Memphis Grizzlies. Veteran swingman Andre Iguodala is also out because of a sore knee.

Kerr said he asked five different assistant coaches, individually, what the starting lineup should be against the Grizzlies.

"I got five totally different answers," he said. "And I laughed each time because there are no easy answers. You hash it out, talk about it as a staff. You really try to think about combinations you want and combinations you don’t want, and then you put it on paper and hope that it goes well. And if it doesn’t, you adjust on the fly."

Offense is Kerr’s biggest concern, given the players he has missing, but the Warriors are fortunate in that the two most important ingredients — leading scorer Steph Curry and primary playmaker Draymond Green — are available, and they have a third player in Kevon Looney, who is in his seventh season with the team and has developed an understanding of how to play off the duo.

"Offensively, it’s trickier for us because we’re a unique team," Kerr said. "We do a lot of stuff that’s based on the Steph-Draymond combination. Looney has learned it so well that we can still thrive, even though we’re not playing so-called modern lineups, where you have a bunch of shooters. But that comes along with experience."

Kerr has opted to minimize how much time is spent on the opposition. "I don’t worry at all about the other team," he said. "Our game plan didn’t change at all based on who was playing for the Kings the other night. I think in these circumstances, you just worry about your team because that’s hard enough."

The Bulls attempt to make adjustments based on whom they’re playing and who is available, but Donovan concludes every scouting report session by reminding his players: "Expect the unexpected. We may see a whole game of zone, and they haven’t played zone all year. You may see them playing a guard at the center spot. They may play five guards. Everything is subject to change."

To this point, teams have been able to bring in players familiar with their systems or whom their coaching staff has worked with before. (Examples: Stanley Johnson, recently signed by the Bulls, was with them in training camp; Lance Stephenson, just signed by the Atlanta Hawks, played for head coach Nate McMillan when they were both with the Pacers; and the Warriors just signed Quinndary Weatherspoon from their G League team, the Santa Cruz Warriors.) But as sudden roster holes continue to appear, teams still find themselves both scouting and teaching on the fly.

Which puts another in-game onus on the coaches: figuring out how to squeeze minutes out of the new additions and still look like a team.

"If you have a shootaround and a breakfast meeting, you say, ‘Here’s the package. Here are the four or five things we’re going to run. Are you comfortable with this?’" Donovan explained. "You get limited. You’d rather have five guys on the same page than one guy looking at the bench, asking, ‘Where do I go? What do I do?’ Shorten it, streamline it, make it somewhat simple, so you can get from action to action, side to side."

Revising expectations is required as well. It’s not whether a defensive stop is made; it’s whether the appropriate defensive coverage was executed. It's not how many shots are made but what kind of shots are taken.

"The new guys don’t know your identity or the style you’re trying to play to," Donovan said. "So you have to look at what the player should be able to do. It becomes, ‘Can we generate good shots?’ We may not be able to score 115 points, but can we generate good enough shots so we can live with the kind of shots we are getting? Can you run back in transition, can you talk and communicate and match up? How are we defending pick-and-roll? We should be able to execute that with anybody."

The yin and yang of teams built around identifiable stars, such as the Bulls with DeRozan and LaVine or the Warriors with Curry and Green, is that if they’re available, they can pick up the slack created by replacements. But if they’re out, their absence is felt even more deeply.

That’s an advantage less established teams, such as the Cavs, have in dealing with the current circumstances. They’ve been operating all season with the idea that their whole has to be greater than the sum of their parts. A player’s ability to mesh in the Cavs’ system might be more important than his overall ability.

"The way that we’re built, we don’t have one or two guys where everything is focused around," Bickerstaff said. "So basically, we need people who are high-character and high-intellect. Because at the end of the day, it’s about making the right pass to the right man, over and over again. The people we are adding have NBA experience and who we’ve done a deep dive into their character and their intellect. That’s what matters to us."

Even the Cavs, though, have to be conscious of how many new additions are on the floor at any one time.

"You have to simplify and pay close attention to your rotation and how many of those guys [unfamiliar with what you do] are on the floor at the same time," Bickerstaff said. "You can blend them in, one out of the five, and kind of hide that one and keep his job real simple. If you have to add more than that, it becomes difficult for you."

One more variance: where a team is playing when the COVID absences strike. The Warriors are fortunate that their roster was COVID-free on their recent five-game Eastern road swing.

"[Wednesday] was our first real practice in a couple of weeks," Kerr said. "We were on the road. We had one day completely off in New York and practiced, but it was at the players' association gym, which is a 60-foot court, so it wasn’t a real practice. [Wednesday] was all about us. Nothing about Memphis. We cleaned up some late-game ATOs [after time-out plays] and went over the stuff we haven’t been able to practice the last few weeks."

The Mavs are in such bad shape that team practices are currently on pause. "Right now, we’re trying to stay away from each other because we’re contagious," Kidd said.

Finally, there’s an added wrinkle to bringing in players from outside the team’s sphere of control and not knowing if they’re bringing the virus with them. The Bulls signed Johnson to a 10-day contract before their Dec. 11 game in Miami against the Heat. Johnson arrived the night before, was tested for COVID in the morning and attended the team’s morning shootaround. After he boarded the team bus to head to the game, Donovan was informed that Johnson, along with rookie Ayo Dosunmu, had tested positive.

"So clearly Stanley came to us with COVID," Donovan said. "There are other guys coming from the G League who are testing positive. So I can only assume they weren’t being tested beforehand, or teams wouldn’t be signing them."

That's a scary proposition, considering that every team had executives and scouts attending the G League Showcase, looking for potential replacements. What are the chances that players filling in for players missing due to COVID are bringing another wave of the virus with them? Or that players who have already had COVID will get infected again? That already happened to both Horford and LaVine. What is to prevent them from catching this virus a third time?

Several coaches privately suggested that the league might eventually have to loosen its rules about players being prohibited from playing if they test positive and shift the bar of eligibility to whether they feel well enough to play. But that raises the question of whether other players would want to be on the floor with someone they know is carrying the virus.

Until all the health risks of the new variant and potential impacts of playing while infected are understood, it’s going to be difficult for the league to do anything other than return to more stringent preventive measures.

If it wants the season to continue, that is.

Kerr, as of now, isn’t sure what the future holds. Before heading into the Warriors’ locker room Wednesday, he said to a writer, "Good to see you again."

Then he added: "Hope it’s not the last time."

Ric Bucher is an NBA writer for FOX Sports. He previously wrote for Bleacher Report, ESPN The Magazine and The Washington Post and has written two books, "Rebound," the story of NBA forward Brian Grant’s battle with young onset Parkinson’s, and "Yao: A Life In Two Worlds," the story of NBA center Yao Ming. He also has a daily podcast, "On The Ball with Ric Bucher." Follow him on Twitter @RicBucher.