The quietest month of the NBA calendar is about to end. The league’s full 2026-27 schedule is on course to be announced next week, according to Marc Stein, which means Lakers fans are days away from learning the answer to the question that has hung over this offseason since the first week of free agency: When does LeBron James walk back into Crypto.com Arena wearing a Philadelphia 76ers uniform?
For most of the league, schedule week is a housekeeping exercise of screenshots and travel-mileage complaints. In Los Angeles it lands differently this year, because the release will put dates on the emotional milestones of the first Lakers season in eight years that belongs entirely to someone other than James.
Luka Doncic’s team gets its opening night, its Christmas assignment and its two trips to Dallas — and the night the franchise’s most recent championship architect returns as a visitor.
When does the NBA schedule come out?
Stein reported the timeline on Tuesday afternoon.
“The NBA’s 2026-27 schedule is on course to be announced in full next week,” wrote Stein.
The reporting matched what he had flagged a day earlier in his subscriber newsletter, where he noted that the full 2026-27 regular season schedule “will soon be released.”
An announcement in full means all 1,230 regular-season games at once — every team’s 82 in a single drop. In recent years the league has treated release day as a broadcast event of its own, and the days before it have traditionally produced partial leaks, with the marquee Christmas matchups often surfacing ahead of the complete schedule.
If that pattern holds, the first Lakers dates could trickle out before the league makes anything official, and the Christmas slate is where the trickle usually starts.
The Lakers’ October, at least in part, is already known. The team announced a five-game preseason slate last month that opens Oct. 5 in Sacramento and closes Oct. 16 against Denver.
What next week fills in is everything after that.
The date every Lakers fan wants first
There is no suspense about which game gets screenshotted first. James signed with the 76ers in July, ending an eight-year run in Los Angeles that produced the 2020 championship, and the schedule will contain exactly two Lakers-76ers matchups: one in Philadelphia and one at Crypto.com Arena.
The home date is the one that will move ticket markets the moment it publishes. It will be the first time the franchise shares a floor with James since the split, the building’s first chance to respond to the player responsible for its most recent banner and, in all likelihood, one of the most-watched regular-season games of the NBA season.
Where the league places it matters too, because a November date reads very differently than a March one, and the NBA has every incentive to put the reunion in a marquee national window.
The road half of the pairing carries its own weight. The Lakers’ trip to Philadelphia will be James’ chance to host his former franchise in front of a crowd that spent July celebrating his arrival, and the two dates together will function as the emotional bookends of the Lakers’ season no matter where they fall on the calendar.
Christmas, opening night and the Dallas trips
The Lakers have been a fixture of the NBA’s Christmas Day slate for decades, and there is little reason to expect the league to leave its most-followed franchise off the marquee in Doncic’s first season as its unquestioned face. The open question is the opponent.
A Christmas date with the 76ers would double as the reunion game and a ratings bonanza, while a matchup with Dallas would put Doncic opposite the franchise that traded him on the sport’s biggest regular-season stage. The league only gets to schedule each of those once.
Opening night is the other placement to watch. The NBA typically opens its season in the third week of October with a nationally televised doubleheader, and a healthy Doncic — who told fans last week that he is 100 percent healthy after the hamstring injury that ended his season — gives the league an obvious opening-week draw.
His declaration reset expectations for a roster that will spend part of this month together at his minicamp in Ljubljana before the real calendar begins. Then there are the two nights in Dallas.
Doncic’s return games have lost none of their charge since the February 2025 trade, and this season’s editions come with a new layer: the Mavericks are now Cooper Flagg’s team, rebuilt by a new front office, and the roster Doncic once led barely exists anymore. Those dates will be circled in two cities at once.
What the schedule means for the roster clock
A schedule release also starts a countdown. The Lakers are hard-capped at the first apron and still carrying an unresolved starting forward question, and once the calendar is public, the gap between today’s roster and opening night becomes measurable in days rather than vibes.
The front office’s trade math — the kind that keeps circling names like De’Andre Hunter — does not change with the schedule, but the urgency does, because training camp and the preseason opener stop being abstractions the moment they have dates attached.
The release will also reveal the texture of the season itself: how the league weighted the Lakers’ national TV load in the first post-LeBron year, how brutal the road trips are, where the NBA Cup group games land and how much rest the schedule-makers gave a roster whose ceiling depends on keeping Doncic healthy through April.
Those details rarely make headlines on release day, and they end up mattering more than almost anything that does.
Next week, all of it stops being hypothetical. The dates arrive, the countdown starts and Lakers fans finally learn when the past is coming to visit.
