In HoopsHype’s month-by-month breakdown of each NBA team’s 2025-26 schedule, only Houston’s October and February opponents grade out as above average in difficulty.
Heading into the NBA’s 2025-26 regular season, the Houston Rockets appear to have one of the league’s easiest schedules.
As further evidence, our friends at HoopsHype broke down which parts of the season would appear to be tougher or easier for each team.
The methodology is as follows:
We used average over/under win projections from the most popular sportsbooks to build a month-by-month Strength of Schedule (SOS) for every NBA team in 2025-26. For each month, we calculated SOS as the simple average of that month’s opponents’ projected wins.
We also tracked games scheduled per month, opponent total wins, and a normalized SOS Index where 100 equals the league-average opponent (the higher the number, the more difficult their schedule is).
The complete data set can be viewed here.
For the Rockets, the monthly breakdown goes as follows:
October 2025: 100.7November 2025: 97.4December 2025: 96.90January 2026: 95.90February 2026: 100.7March 2026: 99.2April 2026: 94.0
So, out of seven months, only two are above the league average of 100 — and both by a very slight amount (100.7). But, there’s more!
October is a very limited sample with by far the fewest games of any month, since there are only three games due to the league’s Oct. 21 start date.
So, among the six months with a more substantive sample, only February — which includes a break of more than a week midway through it for the 2026 NBA All-Star Game — currently grades out as above average in difficulty.
Coming off a season with a 52-30 record and the No. 2 mark in the Western Conference, it would appear that the Rockets — who acquired Kevin Durant this offseason and could have further growth and development by young stars Amen Thompson and Alperen Sengun — should have every opportunity (assuming health) to build on that in the upcoming 2025-26 campaign.