{"id":227557,"date":"2025-08-13T03:00:10","date_gmt":"2025-08-13T03:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/227557\/"},"modified":"2025-08-13T03:00:10","modified_gmt":"2025-08-13T03:00:10","slug":"thunder-to-face-cavaliers-on-mlk-day-in-2025-26-regular-season-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/227557\/","title":{"rendered":"Thunder to face Cavaliers on MLK Day in 2025-26 regular season"},"content":{"rendered":"

Even though August is usually a desert of NBA content, the middle of the month provides an oasis. The league is set to release its 2025-26 regular season schedule on Thursday, Aug. 14. A couple of days before, a few key matchups have already been revealed.<\/p>\n

The NBA revealed its Opening Week and Christmas 2025 schedule. It shouldn’t be surprising to see the Oklahoma City Thunder<\/a> heavily featured in both. The NBA champion will be involved in two of the biggest days of the regular season.<\/p>\n

The Thunder will host the Houston Rockets<\/a> for the 2025-26 Opening Night on Tuesday, Oct. 21. As tradition, they will celebrate their NBA championship with a pregame banner drop and ring ceremony. Kevin Durant’s attendance across the court gives this matchup some extra juice as it will start the NBC era.<\/p>\n

The Thunder will then host the San Antonio Spurs<\/a> for their Christmas contest. The NBA has leaned on the Chet Holmgren and Victor Wembanyama rivalry. That’ll be highlighted once again with a 1:30 p.m. CT tipoff on ABC and ESPN.<\/p>\n

That’s not the only holiday the Thunder will play on, though. The NBA announced on Tuesday that they will be part of a four-game slate on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. It’ll be a marquee matchup too as a possible 2026 NBA Finals preview.<\/p>\n

The Thunder will travel on the road to face the Cleveland Cavaliers<\/a> on Monday, Jan. 19. The 1:30 p.m. CT tipoff will be broadcast on NBC and Peacock.<\/p>\n

Both had the NBA’s best records last season as the sole 60-plus win teams. With the rosters mostly the same, they’ll be in the title conversations again. The Thunder enter the 2025-26 season as a popular pick to repeat as NBA champions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Even though August is usually a desert of NBA content, the middle of the month provides an oasis.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":227558,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3772],"tags":[673,7,306,618,366,17787,311,305,193,3846,130,133,2700,39114,619,292,194,12039,131,39113,70,85,6,2485,62,67,310,179,61,81,698,211,672,474,66,83,534,312,668,693,669],"class_list":{"0":"post-227557","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-cleveland-cavaliers","8":"tag-antonio","9":"tag-basketball","10":"tag-cavaliers","11":"tag-chet","12":"tag-chet-holmgren","13":"tag-christmas","14":"tag-city","15":"tag-cleveland","16":"tag-cleveland-cavaliers","17":"tag-clevelandcavaliers","18":"tag-espn","19":"tag-espn-inc","20":"tag-holiday","21":"tag-holiday-marketplace-hub","22":"tag-holmgren","23":"tag-houston","24":"tag-houston-rockets","25":"tag-hub","26":"tag-inc","27":"tag-marketplace","28":"tag-national","29":"tag-national-sports","30":"tag-nba","31":"tag-nbc","32":"tag-neutral","33":"tag-news","34":"tag-oklahoma","35":"tag-oklahoma-city-thunder","36":"tag-overall","37":"tag-overall-neutral","38":"tag-peacock","39":"tag-rockets","40":"tag-san","41":"tag-san-antonio-spurs","42":"tag-sports","43":"tag-sports-news","44":"tag-spurs","45":"tag-thunder","46":"tag-victor","47":"tag-victor-wembanyama","48":"tag-wembanyama"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":"Validation failed: Text character limit of 500 exceeded"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/227557","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=227557"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/227557\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/227558"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=227557"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=227557"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=227557"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}