Five key Lakers games to look forward to this season

The Los Angeles Lakers‘ complete schedule for the 2025-26 NBA season was released on Thursday. That schedule has some interesting quirks, but it should present them with opportunities to stack up wins at important times.

As always, the Lakers will be prominently featured on national television, as they will have 34 nationally televised games this season. That ties them with the Golden State Warriors, New York Knicks and Oklahoma City Thunder for the most such games.

There are several featured matchups that fans of the Purple and Gold should mark on their calendars. Let’s start with L.A.’s very first regular-season game in October.

Oct. 21 versus the Warriors

Anytime LeBron James and Stephen Curry face off against each other, it is must-see television. The two living legends met in four straight NBA Finals series years ago and have had six total postseason matchups against each other. There could be another playoff series between the two titans to look forward to in the spring of 2026.

Add to that the fact that both teams made considerable improvements midway through last season. The Lakers, of course, stunned the world by landing Luka Doncic, while the Warriors traded for six-time All-Star forward Jimmy Butler. Once Butler made his debut with the Warriors, they went 23-8 through the rest of the regular season.

The Lakers’ second regular-season game this season will be at home against the Minnesota Timberwolves on Oct. 24. Five days later, they will visit Anthony Edwards and crew at Target Center.

The Timberwolves, of course, knocked Los Angeles out of the first round of the 2025 playoffs in five games and took advantage of its lack of depth and gaping hole at the center position. This season, L.A. will have Deandre Ayton starting at the 5, and while its bench still looks a bit underwhelming, it isn’t quite as thin as it was a few months ago.

This contest on Oct. 29 will also be important because the Lakers went 19-22 on the road last season. They lost all four of their road games versus Minnesota in the regular season and playoffs combined during the 2024-25 campaign.

If the Lakers are to move upward and become an elite team, they absolutely have to have a winning record away from Crypto.com Arena. Beating Minnesota in Minnesota would be a good start toward accomplishing that goal.

The Lakers’ second game of group play in the Emirates NBA Cup will be on Nov. 25 against the Clippers at home. This game will be notable not only because they will want to win their second NBA Cup in three seasons, but also because of the Clippers’ repeated attempts to upstage them.

The Clippers made a number of offseason additions, including veteran center Brook Lopez, three-time All-Star guard Bradley Beal, forward John Collins and future Hall of Fame guard Chris Paul. As it often has over the years, the national media has fallen head over heels in love with the Clippers’ roster.

After having lots of trouble defeating their cross-town rivals for about a decade, the Lakers may have finally turned the tide by winning the last two season series against the Clippers.

The Lakers are generally considered to be in the second tier of Western Conference teams along with squads such as the Clippers, Timberwolves and Warriors. If L.A. is to move up and become a true championship contender, it will have to win more than half of its games against other second-tier teams.

The Nuggets are considered by most to be a top-tier team, but they’re a team the Lakers will need to prove they can beat in order to have a real shot at the NBA championship.

Dating back to the 2022-23 season, the Nuggets have owned L.A., but last season, L.A. won the season series three games to one against the Nuggets. Granted, the Lakers were seriously short-handed when they lost in Denver on March 14, and Denver was without guard Jamal Murray and three-time MVP Nikola Jokić when the Lakers defeated Denver on March 19, but it was proof that the Lakers may be able to get the job done against the Nuggets.

This contest on Jan. 20 will kick off a monster eight-game road trip that includes games against the Clippers, Dallas Mavericks, Cleveland Cavaliers and New York Knicks.

April 2 versus the Oklahoma City Thunder

As the 2025-26 schedule winds down, the Lakers will visit the defending NBA champion Thunder. They will then face the Thunder again, this time at home, on April 7.

While the Thunder went 68-14 and were a historically great defensive team last season, L.A. defeated them convincingly at Paycom Center on April 6, 126-99. It played them down to the wire two days later at the same venue until Doncic was ejected on a questionable second technical foul with 7:40 left in the fourth quarter. At the time, the game was tied at 108, but Oklahoma City powered through the rest of the contest for a 136-120 decision.

Oklahoma City isn’t unbeatable. Both the Nuggets and Indiana Pacers took it to seven games in the 2025 playoffs, and both teams may have provided the rest of the league with a bit of a blueprint on how to seriously challenge Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and crew. Hopefully the Lakers were taking some notes.

This article originally appeared on LeBron Wire: Five key Lakers games to look forward to this season

Five key Lakers games to look forward to this season

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