The 2025 NBA Finals, Draft, and Summer League are all now officially over, which means it’s time to look ahead to the 2025-2026 regular season. This October, the NBA will return for an all-new year of basketball action, including weekly games on NBC for the first time in more than 20 years, and the game won’t let up until midway through 2026. 

Professional basketball is known for having one of the most punishing schedules in sports, with each team playing dozens of games across roughly seven months, including time out for the All-Star Weekend each year and an in-season tournament known as the NBA Cup. But just how many games are there in each NBA season? Before the NBA returns to NBC, let’s take a closer look.

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How many games are in an NBA regular season?

The current incarnation of the National Basketball Association features 30 teams scattered across North America, broken up into two conferences, the Eastern and Western, of 15 teams each, with each conference split into three divisions of five teams each. 

Over the course of a typical regular season, each of those 30 teams will play a total of 82 games spread across out more than half a year, beginning in the fall and continuing all the way to late spring, with playoffs happening in late spring and early summer. That adds up to a total of more than 1,200 regular season games, which is a lot of basketball to watch, even if you cut out all other television from your life. 

Why so many games? Well, TV ratings and revenue streams are a big part of that, but it’s also just tradition at this point. NBA teams have been playing 80 or more games each regular season for decades, beginning way back in the 1960s when there were far fewer teams in the league. These days it’s standard practice, and while some pundits have argued for a shorter season, the 82-game standard looks to be set for the foreseeable future. 

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What is the NBA Cup?

Since the 2023-2024 season, the NBA has augmented its regular schedule with the addition of an in-season tournament, now known as the Emirates NBA Cup. The tournament takes place in the fall, early in each NBA regular season, and has emerged as a way to put an extra spotlight on the league during the time when it’s competing directly with the National Football League for viewers. Because the NBA Cup takes place within the regular season, it does not add extra games to the schedule. 

How does it work? It begins with a random drawing to break all 30 teams into six groups of five teams each. Each team is then given a series of four “Cup Night” games, played against each of the other four teams in their assigned group. The six teams with the best record (accounting for tiebreaker rules) in each group, along with two “wild card” teams, one from the Eastern Conference and one from the Western, will advance to “Knockout Rounds.”

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The Knockout Rounds function as Quarterfinals and Semifinals for the NBA Cup, with four games in the first round and two games in the semifinals. The winners of each semifinal will then face off in the NBA Cup Championship, the only game in the Cup that does not count toward the regular season (meaning two teams in the league will play 83 games). The winner receives the NBA Cup, with the winning team’s players receiving cash prizes, and the league also awards an NBA Cup Most Valuable Player Award. 

The 2025 edition of the NBA Cup will kick off on Halloween and continue through mid-December, when the Championship will be played in Las Vegas, Nevada. 

When does the NBA return to NBC?

As part of a new 11-year agreement between NBCUniversal and the NBA, the league will return to NBC this October, with weekly games streaming live on Peacock on Monday nights, and Tuesday games airing live on NBC and streaming on Peacock. In early 2026, at the conclusion of the NFL season, NBC will also launch Sunday Night Basketball, a primetime Sunday program highlighting some of the biggest games of the NBA season. 

For more NBA news, check out NBC Sports.