We asked 10 leading NBA voices on Substack:
What jumps out to you in the 2026-27 NBA schedule?
Check out their answers and subscribe!
Marc Stein | The Stein Line
Maybe a 3 p.m. tipoff can work on Day 1 of the NBA’s regular season. You can’t really call it Opening Night if the curtain-raiser is an afternoon game, but Major League Baseball certainly has staged successful early starts on Opening Day and the World Cup just proved that some early kickoff times do work if the occasion is right.
What baffles me more than anything was the NBA’s willingness to commence its three-day run of schedule reveals by announcing the Day 1 and Christmas Day slates so early on Tuesday. Good Morning America? The Today Show? Are those shows where the basketball audience is?
It was the 7 a.m. hour in the East and so a good bit of the nation was presumably asleep and/or offline when tweets with schedule details started going out. Very funky.
Keith Smith | The Basketball Bulletin
The NBA’s increasing focus on daytime games is interesting.
We have the 3 p.m. ET opener between the Celtics and Pistons. Then we have the annual Christmas quintuple-header.
The league returned to its prior form with the all-day MLK Day slate, while adding another all-day slate on Presidents Day too.
If that’s not enough, the vast majority of Saturdays and Sundays feature one or more games that start in the afternoon.
As someone who adores matinee hoops, I welcome this change!
Neil Paine | Neil’s Substack
Call me a crank, but I am reflexively annoyed at the NBA trying to be like the NFL and make its “schedule release” a thing.
I barely tolerate that behavior from the NFL, but at least the NFL’s regular season matters — each game carries a lot of weight toward teams’ chances of making the playoffs and/or winning their division or, ultimately, the Super Bowl.
Very few games in the NBA regular season matter, which has been a problem for a long time: I once found that 82 games per team in the NBA is the equivalent of a 343-game MLB season, for instance. Baseball doing a schedule reveal of nearly 350 games per team would be absurd, but that’s basically what this is.
If you’re going to try to make this a thing, shorten the regular season so the games actually have stakes; otherwise, let me enjoy my summer.
Mark Whicker | The Morning After
The game I want to see is March 26, Knicks at Charlotte. It's the lowest get-in price ($50) for any Knicks game this year. And I've always wanted the chance to bet that Sion James will outscore Pacôme Dadiet….
More to the point, I'd want to be at Sixers at Cleveland, March 1. There's a chance it's LeBron's last visit to his original pro crib. If there's true harmonic convergence, you could see (A) Cleveland's only championship banner and (B) Joel Embiid in uniform, in the same place. Wear dark glasses and don't look at either one directly.
Katie Heindl | BASKETBALL FEELINGS
Instead of being cheeky and going for some deep cut mid-March, I'm picking the first game on the slate for Christmas Day: Knicks vs. Spurs.
I keep picturing Victor Wembanyama, wandering the city the night before, glum to be missing Réveillon de Noël (though I'm sure there's no shortage of restaurants in New York City that would jump at the chance to serve him sumptuous dish upon dish in the French holiday tradition) and haunted by the image of Jalen Brunson as a stout, indefatigable Santa waiting for him the next morning.
That, and this is the perfect, delicious, pretend-there's-no-stakes-’cause-it's-Christmas but actually infused with rivalry and rich with contention NBA Xmas game. A feast for the senses, a Réveillon de Noël after all.
Chris Gunther | Charting Hoops
Last season, the then-defending champions started 24-1, sparking a debate over where OKC fit in the “greatest team of all time” discussion. The Thunder cooled off, partly because their schedule heated up. In the first quarter of the season, OKC didn’t play a single top-four team.
The Knicks won’t have it so easy. They host Philadelphia on opening night (fourth in preseason betting odds), then play Boston (fifth), Detroit (sixth), and Philly again over the next week. The Thunder played just seven games against above-average competition in October and November; the Knicks have 13 such games.
So don’t be surprised if New York “struggles.” Then again, maybe they continue their championship form and we start another GOAT debate.
Jonathan Macri | Knicks Film School
Depending on what happens in the NBA Cup qualifying games, there’s a chance the defending world champions won’t play a home game between November 29 and December 23. And then after a week back in New York for the holidays — including facing the Spurs on Christmas — they’re back on the road for a 10-day, six-game western swing.
If the Knicks can make it through that gauntlet in one piece, they’ll be in postseason form by the middle of January.
Scott Agness | Fieldhouse Files
I know it’s my beat … but I’m stunned that six Eastern Conference teams will appear on national TV opening week — and the Pacers aren’t one of them.
They pushed OKC to Game 7 of the 2025 NBA Finals and led at halftime despite All-NBA guard Tyrese Haliburton tearing his Achilles.
What a difference one lost season makes. The league moves on fast. Even more: Haliburton’s return won’t happen in front of Pacers fans, but 800 miles away in New Orleans.
Jacob Sutton | JSuttHoops
My takeaway from this year’s schedule is that it will be very easy for the Kings to be very bad.
Sacramento has the most jam-packed stretch to deal with: 12 games in 19 days (the most in a 19-day stretch leaguewide) with four back-to-backs.
Between January 2nd and the 20th, they play OKC, Detroit, New York, the Lakers, and lots of average-at-worst teams. With the new lottery rules, there’s never been a worse time to have a stretch like that (or to be a Kings fan).
Ricardo Brito Reis | Borracha Laranja
Adam Silver took the NBA Cup from European soccer, by his own admission. And to be fair, the league is carrying a record 115 games in European prime time this season.
But ESPN’s Dave McMenamin reported that Europe came third in the reasoning for the 3 p.m. ET opener, filed as an added bonus: prime time on the continent. That bonus lands at 8 p.m. in Lisbon — the exact minute most of Champions League Matchday 3 kicks off.
Europe is a soccer continent, unfortunately for those of us who’d rather it weren’t, and Paul George versus John Collins will not move it.
Wembanyama’s season debut? Tips at 3:30 a.m. in Paris.
@Neil Paine, has the schedule release been a big thing for a long time?