{"id":447695,"date":"2026-01-30T16:29:07","date_gmt":"2026-01-30T16:29:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/447695\/"},"modified":"2026-01-30T16:29:07","modified_gmt":"2026-01-30T16:29:07","slug":"cavs-nba-to-explore-changing-court-design","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/447695\/","title":{"rendered":"Cavs, NBA To Explore Changing Court Design"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Cavaliers and the NBA will meet to discuss the possibility of changing the unusual court design at Rocket Arena, reports Joe Vardon of The Athletic<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The Cavs\u2019 home court, which features a gap between the arena floor and the playing surface, is under scrutiny<\/a> again after Lakers star Luka Doncic<\/a> fell off the sidelines on Wednesday and injured his left ankle.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhile improvements have been made to the arena floor over the years to address this issue, the NBA and the Cavaliers are revisiting the situation given the incident (on Wednesday),\u201d a league spokesperson said, per Vardon.<\/p>\n

As Vardon explains, the Cavs have the only raised home court in the NBA \u2014 it\u2019s about 10 inches above the rubber mat that covers the arena\u2019s hockey rink, with floor seats positioned on the rubber that covers the ice. A Cavs spokesperson told The Athletic that the court is \u201cfully compliant\u201d with NBA rules, but the Lakers aren\u2019t the first team to submit a complaint to the league about the design.<\/p>\n

The Heat contacted the NBA<\/a> to express concerns about the layout back in the fall of 2023, when Dru Smith<\/a> fell off the side of the court and suffered a season-ending ACL injury. Doncic appears to have avoided a serious injury himself \u2013 he\u2019s listed as questionable to suit up on Friday \u2013 but the National Basketball Players Association has conveyed its own concerns about what it views as a \u201csafety issue,\u201d Vardon writes.<\/p>\n

As Vardon outlines, there are several potential fixes the Cavs and the NBA could consider, though none would necessarily be easy or cheap.<\/p>\n

Possible solutions might include widening the court to put the floor seats on top of it; getting rid of the wood blocks the court sits on and making sure the arena stays cold enough that the ice wouldn\u2019t melt through the rubber and affect the court; or reducing the size of those wood blocks to narrow the gap between the court and the arena floor, mitigating the drop-off.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Cavaliers and the NBA will meet to discuss the possibility of changing the unusual court design at…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":447696,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[574],"tags":[64,63,726,85],"class_list":["post-447695","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-basketball","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-basketball","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/447695","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=447695"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/447695\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/447696"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=447695"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=447695"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=447695"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}