One of the go-to mantras from the Gregg Popovich coaching handbook is a leaguewide credo now. No one in the N.B.A., as Popovich has been saying in San Antonio for years, wants to be caught “skipping steps” as the league begins the most challenging undertaking in its history.

This week, though, coaches also can’t help it. Not when the chance to hold an actual practice for the first time in months is just days away.

The focus, for now, is rightfully on the process of getting the 22 teams invited to participate in the restart of the 2019-20 season safely onto the N.B.A.’s campus at the Walt Disney World Resort near Orlando, Fla.

Teams were scheduled to arrive in three waves — six teams on Tuesday, eight on Wednesday and eight more on Thursday — with each club bringing a traveling party of no more than 37. Players, coaches and staff members will be asked to quarantine in their rooms for 36 to 48 hours and register two consecutive negative coronavirus tests before they can start participating in team activities.

This stage of populating the N.B.A.’s bubble is of critical importance and comes with considerable apprehension baked into it. Despite the league’s persistent belief that life on the campus will be safer than anywhere else N.B.A. personnel could be outside it, there is no diminishing the daunting nature of erecting and controlling a single-site environment for more than 300 players on a scale that has never been attempted.

“We have to get there,” Los Angeles Clippers Coach Doc Rivers said of the looming check-in step. “You’re almost nervous about that.”

Yet it is also true, with apologies to Popovich, that teams (and especially coaches) can’t help but look a step or two ahead to the weekend and the return of full-speed group practices.

With games scheduled to begin July 30, time is of the essence: Players will have about three weeks, once they exit their quarantines to start practicing, to re-acclimate their bodies to full five-on-five speed and physicality after what has been, for many, the longest layoff of their basketball lives.

Although several coaches have raved about the diligence many players have shown to stay as close to game-readiness as possible, every coach not-so-secretly wishes his team had more prep time to reduce the risk of soft-tissue injuries. The standard N.B.A. off-season, remember, features weeks and weeks of pickup games. Access to five-on-five play has been extremely limited during the coronavirus pandemic — and persistent rumblings about the games that LeBron James, to name one example, has been arranging in Los Angeles conveniently overlook that such gatherings are technically against league rules.

Team practice facilities have been open for weeks, but with nothing resembling practice — nothing, in fact, beyond one-on-none drills with coaches only — allowed by the league office. It’s a drastic reduction in prep time for players who are accustomed to congregating at those facilities starting in early September to get almost a month of work in, with games typically offered on Mondays through Thursdays, before training camp officially starts.

“This is a different, unique ramp-up,” Washington Wizards General Manager Tommy Sheppard said. “The physical demand of playing basketball is different than running on a treadmill, doing Peloton, doing workouts in your garage on Zoom. We’ll have basically two weeks to really get to five-on-five.

“I think a lot of teams are jumping in right now, trying to figure out: ‘How can we shortcut this? How can we short-circuit the system and get everybody out on the floor and do more and more and more?’ I just feel strongly that’s going to hurt us on the back end. We’re going to predispose ourselves to injury if we try to go any faster.”

Complicating matters is the abrupt nature of the N.B.A.’s pause on March 11. As Pete Youngman, the former director of sports medicine for the Sacramento Kings who held a full-time role with the franchise for 25 years, noted in a telephone interview, many players were “in their peak, prime condition” when the season was indefinitely suspended.

“The biggest concern I have is the unknown long-term effects on the heart and lungs and minds of those who do get Covid-19,” Youngman said. “Even if it’s a mild, asymptomatic case, we don’t know that yet.

“The musculoskeletal stuff — that’s my second-largest worry. In mid-March, players are really hitting their peak fitness, physically and mentally. They can sense the playoffs coming. As far as ramping them up, now you’re trying to jam it all into three weeks.”

Germany’s Bundesliga, one of the world’s top soccer leagues, was rocked by 12 soft-tissue injuries in May on its first weekend back after a two-month stoppage. In the N.B.A., there is a “high risk of injury that we’re going to face as well,” said Dr. Daniel Medina, the Washington Wizards’ chief of athlete care and performance and a former team physician for the Spanish soccer power Barcelona.

“We’re doing our best, and we’re going to do as much as we can to avoid them,” Medina said. “But we know they’re going to happen.”

To Medina, it’s not just “the time they have been at home” that makes a fast-tracked return so challenging, but also how long many players have gone without exposure to true, full-speed contact. There is no easy way for players to replicate that or the midair decisions they make in reacting to contact, Medina said, no matter how much players may prepare for it in the weight room or with individual drills.

Yet he did sound hopeful about one potential benefit of the N.B.A.’s new setup. “We’ve never had a situation of density of calendar with no traveling,” Medina said. “Even the back-to-backs are going to be looking different when you just finish the game and go home.”

T.O. Souryal, who served as the Dallas Mavericks’ team doctor for 22 years and is a past president of the N.B.A. Physicians Association, sees at least one other area of encouragement — even after all the concern Souryal expressed in last week’s newsletter about the “dangerous virus that can kill.”

“Soft-tissue injuries are to be expected after a long delay,” Souryal said. “But I think the N.F.L. has a much bigger issue to deal with on soft-tissue injuries than the N.B.A., and that’s because you can’t simulate football during a pandemic. Basketball players can play one-on-one. They have drills where they can closely approximate game situations on their own. That’s much harder for football players. The basketball players are not as deconditioned as you think.”

Let’s hope. Any positive surprise would be welcome after a steady stream of teams bound for Disney World felt the need over the past two weeks to close their training facilities following positive coronavirus tests. Sacramento, Milwaukee, Miami, Denver, Phoenix, the Los Angeles Clippers and the Nets all took that step, which not surprisingly overshadowed a positive development: The Toronto Raptors have managed to keep the coronavirus out of their temporary bubble at Florida Gulf Coast University and a nearby hotel in Naples, Fla., where the defending champions have been based since June 22.

All those closures have only added to player anxiety — on top of the strong desire so many players feel to keep the Black Lives Matter movement at the forefront of the league’s return. The depths of the trepidation voiced by the likes of Portland’s Damian Lillard, San Antonio’s DeMar DeRozan and New Orleans’ JJ Redick in interviews over the past week has been piling up.

“We’re getting our arms around what’s ahead,” Sheppard said.

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Corner Three

You ask; I answer. Every week in this space, I’ll field three questions posed via email at marcstein-newsletter@nytimes.com. (Please include your first and last name, as well as the city you’re writing in from, and make sure “Corner Three” is in the subject line.)

Q: Plight? The plan always seemed to be that the window opens next year with KD back and this season was more or less a wash. Has that changed? — @zaziethedog from Twitter

Stein: Yes, plight. You were not alone in questioning the use of that word to describe the Nets’ mounting health and roster challenges, but what they are going through very much qualifies.

DeAndre Jordan and Spencer Dinwiddie, both Nets starters, announced last week that they had tested positive for the coronavirus — after four Nets players tested positive in March. The team will be without at least five veterans — Jordan, Dinwiddie, Kevin Durant, Kyrie Irving and Wilson Chandler — when the N.B.A. restarts the 2019-20 season later this month because of either injury or coronavirus-related absences. And ESPN reported Tuesday night that Taurean Prince has also tested positive for the coronavirus, which would take the number to six.

In other words: No matter how well next season may go for the Nets, “plight” — as I described it in a tweet last week on the one-year anniversary of the free-agent commitments that the Nets received from Durant and Irving — was charitable. This is a crisis now.

Just because Durant has missed this whole season while recovering from a torn right Achilles’ tendon, taking the Nets out of the championship mix until his second season in Brooklyn at the earliest, let’s not be so callous that we forget how dispiriting the present is.

Someone much closer to the situation than me — Nets Coach Jacque Vaughn — called the team’s roster issues and sudden size shortage a “stress test” in a conference call Saturday with reporters. Vaughn also described recent events as “trauma” for the Nets.

Q: You referred to the Nets getting Durant and Irving as “maybe the greatest day in franchise history.” What about winning the chance to sign Lew Alcindor? What about when Rick Barry joined the team? What about John Roche and a huge playoff upset victory over Artis Gilmore, Dan Issel and the Kentucky Colonels? What about when Dr. J joined the team? What about the two A.B.A. championships they won when the best team in New York played on Long Island? — Kevin Ata

Stein: Excellent points. The sentence you cited from last week’s newsletter had a major flaw: I didn’t specify that I was talking about the Nets’ N.B.A. history.

The franchise’s A.B.A. highs were glorious. Shame on me for not making the distinction more clear.

Yet as a single-day event, I think the sentiment stands in assessing the Nets’ N.B.A. history, even accounting for the Nets’ trips to the N.B.A. finals in 2002 and 2003 after trading for Jason Kidd.

Have the Nets, since the N.B.A.-A.B.A. merger entering the 1976-77 season, had a better 24 hours than they enjoyed on June 30, 2019, when Durant and Irving chose Barclays Center over Madison Square Garden? Not everyone would agree — hence the use of the word “maybe” — but it’s a debate we can have.

Even though Durant and Irving still have so much to prove as a duo, I truly believe that.

Q: It’s perfectly fine. It’s better than all the big fast-food chains. It ain’t a religious experience. SoCal people have been overselling this for years. — @HowardBeck from Twitter

Stein: Mr. Beck, of Bleacher Report, is one of my best friends in the basketball writing business and, well, life. He was my highly decorated successor covering the Los Angeles Lakers at The Los Angeles Daily News, preceded me with great distinction at The New York Times and is someone I lean on heavily for guidance, workshopping and general camaraderie in a profession that mysteriously doesn’t seem to be getting much easier even as we get older and (allegedly) smarter.

Howard, however, has a worrisome habit: He can’t resist goading me on Twitter to defend my love for In-N-Out hamburgers — my fierce loyalty to what The New York Times, in a 2002 article, called “a burger cult.”

I almost let my man Hojo drag me back into the social media ring Thursday night, when he spotlighted a recent TikTok skit that featured two guys in a car asserting that In-N-Out is overrated. But I (mostly) resisted, deciding instead — figuring no one would mind a fun, inconsequential topic these days — to briefly address it here.

On the West Coast, where I came of age after leaving Western New York in 1978, In-N-Out has no peer. Since I left Southern California as a full-time resident in 1997, In-N-Out has established an even greater reach as a chain, with more than 300 restaurants in six states and a reputation, as The Times put it in a subsequent 2004 article, as the go-to stop for Hollywood’s “rich and famous” when they “crave the pleasure of a cheeseburger and fries.”

If you’ve had In-N-Out, and you don’t think it’s the best drive-through burger in the history of fast food, it’s really no problem — and it’s certainly not important.

No two palates are the same. There will never be consensus on such a topic. I simply couldn’t let it go because the subject gets especially tiresome for a Texas resident like myself, who is regularly subjected to laughable claims from Texans that Whataburger is a superior chain.

In-N-Out opened a handful of branches in Texas starting in 2011, and they were so popular at the outset that some required police officers to patrol the parking lot to manage the snarl of cars. In nearly a quarter-century of living in Dallas, I’ve never seen traffic at a Whataburger that necessitated police intervention, or even a crowd big enough to dissuade you from pulling up.

To put it in N.B.A. terms: I remember covering multiple Dallas Mavericks teams that would order a post-game spread from In-N-Out after playing in Los Angeles or Sacramento. That’s how badly players wanted the delicacy as soon as they entered California. I can’t remember a single time, by contrast, that a visiting team in Dallas arranged to have Whataburger waiting in the locker room after a road game against the Mavericks.

If there is any evidence anywhere to prove that any fast-food burger is preferable, please forward us the details. I would love to go somewhere and acquaint myself with such a burger if life ever allows us to travel and dine normally again.

In the interim, if you share Hojo Beck’s view that In-N-Out is an overhyped institution, I won’t keep trying to convince you otherwise. Listen to him.

Even one fewer car in the drive-through line for the rest of us to wait out would help.

Numbers Game

37

Traveling parties for the 22 teams headed to Walt Disney World this week for the resumption of the 2019-20 season will include 35 people from basketball operations, including 13 to 17 players, and two from the business side of the organization.

371

Indiana’s Victor Oladipo was sidelined for 371 days by a ruptured quadriceps tendon in his right knee sustained in January 2019. He played in only 13 games this season before the N.B.A. suspended play on March 11, averaging 13.8 points per game on 39.1 percent shooting from the field and 30.4 percent shooting from 3-point range. The risk of re-injury was the main factor that convinced Oladipo to bypass participating in the N.B.A. restart scheduled to begin July 30.

3

Since joining Indiana, Oladipo and Domantas Sabonis, both acquired from Oklahoma City in a trade for Paul George in July 2017, have combined to earn three All-Star selections — three more than most league observers predicted. The duo’s success has changed perceptions about the trade from the Pacers’ end — in a positive way — after they dealt George to the Thunder without receiving a first-round draft pick in return, but tough decisions on Oladipo’s future loom. He has just one season left on his contract at $21 million, but is eligible for a four-year extension from the Pacers worth $113 million in October.

6

J.R. Smith’s last N.B.A. game before signing with the Los Angeles Lakers last week was on Nov. 19, 2018, in a six-minute appearance for the Cleveland Cavaliers in a road loss to Detroit. With the Cavaliers off to a 2-13 start that season, Smith was deactivated after that defeat and sent home to wait for a trade that never materialized. Cleveland’s next game, at the time of Smith’s departure, was LeBron James’s first in town as a member of the Lakers.

10

Wednesday is the 10th anniversary of LeBron James announcing that he was leaving the Cleveland Cavaliers in free agency to sign with the Miami Heat. James, of course, revealed the move in a widely criticized TV special known as “The Decision” that, a decade later, is regarded by many around the league as the start of the player empowerment era.

8

James’s teams reached the N.B.A. finals in each of the first eight seasons after “The Decision” — but only half of those finals trips were made with the Heat. James returned to his home-state Cavaliers in July 2014 and could not prevent the Golden State Warriors from snatching Team of the Decade status away from Miami by winning three titles and making five trips to the finals from 2015 through 2019.

Hit me up anytime on Twitter (@TheSteinLine) or Facebook (@MarcSteinNBA) or Instagram (@thesteinline). Send any other feedback to marcstein-newsletter@nytimes.com.