Now the game is finally getting tough in the NBA: off to the playoffs

Playoffs NBA, the most frenetic two months of American sport, the ones in which the fast forward button seems to be pressed compared to everything that has happened before. It is the effect of the programming, not accidental, of the interweaving between leagues: the NBA starts relatively silent, begins to emerge from hibernation towards the end of February and becomes light once the university basketball season is over, which absorbs the interest of a nation not for the quality of the game but for the diffusion in every corner of America, as does not happen for professional sport. Curious, however, that precisely in the hours in which the novelty of recent years was played, or rather the mini-tournament play-in to promote the bottom two teams to the main draw, the NBA experienced very different states of mind: satisfaction with the new overall record for crowds and sold-out crowds, widely publicized, and concern about rising costs, kept hidden until a leak revealed an internal directive, drafted by CFO David Haber and one of the executives, Kyle Cavanaugh, with the invitation to cut expenses, travel less and drastically curb new hires for the rest of the fiscal year, which will end at the end of October. Once the oxen have fled, an NBA spokesman admitted that this is not an unusual procedure at a time when companies of all kinds are trying to cut costs, but the juxtaposition between triumphalism for public records and financial fears opens up a particular window. Above all because the new collective labor agreement, verbally agreed between the League and the players’ representatives with final approval expected shortly, guaranteeing stability for at least six years will inevitably lead to larger television contracts, just as happened in the NFL.