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• Complete schedule: 2026-27 NBA season
From Oct. 20 through April 11, the NBA calendar for the 2026-27 regular season is jam-packed with national TV games – 247 matchups featuring every team across ABC/ESPN, NBC/Peacock and Prime Video – plus all other games on League Pass.
To fit 1,230 regular-season games into a roughly six-month window is complicated and requires immense effort and planning, especially when factoring in national TV games, game density, miles traveled per team, international games, Emirates NBA Cup 2026 contests and Election Day.
The NBA has made a concerted effort to create a schedule that reduces travel and limits back-to-backs and other challenging scheduling circumstances.
Here are notable structural items regarding the 2026-27 NBA schedule:
• Teams average 14.2 back-to-backs in 2026-27, the lowest back-to-back average since the introduction of the Emirates NBA Cup. No team will play more than 16 back-to-backs, commensurate with last season.
• The 2026-27 NBA schedule features zero instances of four games in five nights, eight games in 12 nights or 18 games in 30 nights. Those are the three schedule patterns that teams consider the most difficult.
• Teams will not play the day before they play in these games: national TV opening week games; all Emirates NBA Cup games; Christmas games; the four-game Martin Luther King Jr. Day schedule; four-game Presidents’ Day lineup; 10-game ABC Saturday slate; six-game ABC Sunday schedule; and the 16-game NBC Sunday schedule.
• All 30 teams will play on the final day of the regular season, Sunday, April 11. In an effort to maximize competitive fairness, the seven games between Eastern Conference teams and the one interconference game will begin at 6 p.m. ET, and the seven games between Western Conference teams will start at 8:30 p.m. ET. No games will be played on April 10.
• Estimated miles traveled remain near all-time lows with teams traveling an estimated 42,500 miles in the 80-game schedule. (Two games will be added to team schedules once the Emirates NBA Cup 2026 Group Play concludes.)
• The NBA also focused on lengthy travel involving back-to-backs, and there are just 59 back-to-backs involving 750-plus miles of travel in 2026-27. That’s down from 74 last season and the third lowest in the history of the 30-team era.
• There are 47 TV games on the second night of back-to-backs this season, an improvement of 66 from last season.
• There are no games scheduled for Election Day on Nov. 3 as the NBA “focuses on encouraging fans to make a plan to vote and participate in the civic process.”
• Every team has at least two national TV appearances.
• All 30 teams will play their home opener within six days of the start of the season.
