The NBA announced its full schedule for the 2024-25 regular season on Thursday, and while that schedule generally holds no surprises (it’s not like the NFL, where a team plays less than half the other teams in the league), it’s still worth checking off certain dates and top games.
Zach Harper of The Athletic, Chris Mannix of SI.com and ESPN did just that: Harper highlighted 35 games he’s looking forward to, Mannix named 10 games to watch and ESPN identified 23 games not to miss.
It is not surprising that the Curtsy/Celts Opening of the regular season (October 22), Paul George‘s return to Los Angeles with the Six (6 November) and Klay Thompson‘s return to Golden State with the loner (November 12) made it onto all three lists.
The other two pairings that appeared on all three lists? wizard at Falcons on October 28th in the first meeting of the two best draft picks of this year (Zaccharie Risacher And Alex Sarr) And Spores at thunder on 30 October in the first of this season Victor Wembanyama/Chet Holmgren Showdown.
Here is more news from the world of basketball:
- A total of seven NBA teams operated under the salary cap and used the space to make changes in the offseason. As Keith Smith of Spotrac writes, these clubs used their salary cap in very different ways, with some – like the Six And thunder – some of them (like the Hornets) with a focus on salary income in trade, and one (the jazz) uses most of its flexibility to renegotiate the contract of a star player.
- Which NBA teams have been the “cheapest” in recent years and which have been the most willing to spend money? Bleacher Report’s Eric Pincus explores this question by ranking each team by their spending from 2017 to 2024 and considering whether the clubs would have been willing to invest more in those rosters. warrior, Hair clipperAnd dollar were the largest donors over the last seven years, while the Bulls, PistonsAnd Hornets are at the other end of the list.
- In a three-part series for The Athletic, David Aldridge ranks all 30 NBA clubs based on how much they improved their rosters through their offseason trades. Aldridge’s list, which is sorted by which teams improved the most in the short term rather than which clubs made the “best” trades, includes the thunder, SixAnd magic at the top. It is no coincidence that these clubs have made three of the biggest free agent contracts of the summer, Isaiah Hartenstein, Paul GeorgeAnd Kentavious Caldwell-Poperespectively.
