The first four days of the 2025-26 regular season will feature eight national games, with doubleheaders on NBC, ESPN (two) and Prime Video.
Complete opening-week schedule for national games ⬇️
NBA Schedule Release presented by @Ticketmaster. pic.twitter.com/SpK3Jbciqk
— NBA Communications (@NBAPR) August 13, 2025
The Los Angeles Lakers will open up the upcoming 2025-26 NBA season on Tuesday, Oct. 21, by hosting Stephen Curry and the Golden State Warriors. That game is the second game of a doubleheader on the first night of the regular season schedule league-wide.
The Lakers will also reportedly head to Northern California and take on the Sacramento Kings on Sunday, Oct. 26. On Wednesday, the NBA unveiled every nationally televised game that will take place during the first week of the regular season, and it revealed that L.A. will host the Minnesota Timberwolves on Friday, Oct. 24. That contest will be shown on Amazon Prime Video.
The Timberwolves, of course, knocked the Lakers out of the first round of the 2025 NBA Playoffs in five games. They exposed L.A.’s very weak center rotation, which featured Jaxson Hayes, who is best suited to being a backup, and a number of forwards who were forced to masquerade as small-ball centers. That resulted in L.A. getting badly outrebounded.
But this coming season, the Lakers will have Deandre Ayton, who has career averages of 16.4 points and 10.5 rebounds a game, starting at the 5. They will also be able to deploy former Defensive Player of the Year Marcus Smart on budding superstar Anthony Edwards, who went off for 43 points in Game 4 of that first-round playoff series in May.
The full regular-season schedule for all 30 teams will be released on Thursday, Aug. 14.