When the NBA schedule was first published yesterday on NBA.com, there was the fun little oddity of the words "Oklahoma City Thunder" being here and there, even though the former SuperSonics do not yet have an official name, at least publicly.
And there was even a game or two on the schedule "@ Seattle."
There were also -- I swear I saw it with my own eyes, although it is now gone -- several games at neutral locations, clustered on the dates February 27 and April 15. There must have been a dozen or two such games.
And on those days, there was some crazy arena-swapping going on.
TrueHoop readers Phil and Jeremy e-mailed about the same thing, and they had noted the following games, for instance:
- Magic vs. Bobcats in Chicago
- Magic vs. Pistons in Washington D.C.
- Timberwolves vs. Blazers in New Orleans
- Timberwolves vs. Kings in Memphis
- Grizzlies vs. Hawks in New York
- Oklahoma City vs. the Clippers in Phoenix
There were many others.
In what must have amounted to one of the most stressful and sweaty days in NBA web intern history, these notes about arena-swapping have all been removed from the NBA's web schedule (as have all the other bugaboos, as far as I can tell).
So, what is with the weird neutral site thing? Is this some kind of surprise that is going to be sprung on us with much fanfare as the season draws near?
Furthering the intrigue, check out your team's schedule around those dates. In some cases (but not others), teams will be near their alleged neutral site locations on those dates. For instance, the Magic are in New York on February 25, and Philadelphia on February 28. A game in D.C. on February 27 would make a lot of sense, and that's what the original schedule said. (Now it has Dwight Howard and company flying all the way down to Orlando in between.) Similarly, the Blazers' rumored game in New Orleans comes at the tail end of a Texas swing.
But according to the NBA, there is nothing to it. A league official in the know tells me there are no plans for any neutral site games this season, and any indication otherwise on NBA.com was doubtless a "technical glitch."
