How Many Games in an NBA Season? The 82-Game Schedule
Each NBA team plays 82 regular-season games, 41 at home and 41 away. How many games in an NBA season, who plays whom, and why the number has held since 1967.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished NBA Season, Playoffs & Draft26 min read
- Regular-season games per team
- 82
- Home games per team
- 41
- Games across the league
- 1,230
- First 82-game season
- 1967-68
The Boston Celtics and Indiana Pacers played 81 games in 2012-13. Their meeting at TD Garden on April 16, the day after the Boston Marathon bombing, was canceled and never made up, and it is the only time since the schedule reached 82 games that two clubs have finished a full season one short. For everyone else, every year, the number is 82.
That is the answer to how many games are in an NBA season: 82 in the regular season for each of the league's 30 teams, 41 of them at home and 41 on the road. Across the National Basketball Association that comes to 1,230 games, played from late October to the middle of April. The preseason before it does not count. The play-in tournament and the playoffs after it are a separate competition with their own records. The count has stood at 82 since 1967-68, which makes it older than the three-point line, the draft lottery and 18 of the league's current franchises.
How many games in an NBA season: 82, split 41 and 41
Three numbers describe the whole thing. Each team plays 82. Half are home dates. And because every game involves two teams, the league total is 30 times 82 divided by two, which is 1,230.
- 82Games per team
- 41Home games per team
- 41Road games per team
- 1230Games league-wide
The standard design of a full NBA regular season with 30 teams. Preseason, play-in and playoff games are not included.
The season runs for about 25 weeks. Opening night falls in the second half of October, and the last regular-season games are played on a Sunday in the middle of April. Spread 82 games across that window and a team plays roughly every other day, a little more than three times a week, for six months.
A .500 record is 41-41. A 50-win season, the old shorthand for a good team, means losing 32 times. The best regular season ever played, by the 2015-16 Golden State Warriors, was 73-9, and our page on the best record in NBA history covers how that team and the 72-10 Chicago Bulls of 1995-96 got there. Nobody has gone unbeaten at home across all 41 dates. The 1985-86 Celtics came closest at 40-1, a mark the San Antonio Spurs matched in 2015-16.
The 41-and-41 split deserves one caveat. A small number of games each season are played at neutral sites, including regular-season dates abroad and, in the first years of the NBA Cup, the semifinals in Las Vegas. One team is designated the home club for scheduling purposes, and the league balances the books so that nobody gives up a home date without being accounted for. The design is 41 each. The lived experience for a team sent to another continent in January can be a 40-game home slate and a long flight.
What "regular season" excludes matters as much as what it contains. The standings, the seeding, the scoring title and the awards all come from these 82 games and nothing else. A player's career totals are reported in two columns, regular season and playoffs, and they are never added together in the league's record book.
The opponent formula: who a team plays four, three and two times
Eighty-two is not a round number, and it does not divide neatly into anything. The NBA makes it work with a formula that sorts a team's 29 possible opponents into four groups according to where they sit in the league's alignment of two conferences and six divisions. That alignment is set out in our guide to how many teams are in the NBA.
| Opponent group | Teams in group | Games against each | Total games | Home games |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Division rivals | 4 | 4 | 16 | 8 |
| Same conference, other divisions, four-game group | 6 | 4 | 24 | 12 |
| Same conference, other divisions, three-game group | 4 | 3 | 12 | 6 |
| Other conference | 15 | 2 | 30 | 15 |
| All opponents | 29 | 2 to 4 | 82 | 41 |
Read down the last two columns and the arithmetic closes: 16 plus 24 plus 12 plus 30 is 82, and 8 plus 12 plus 6 plus 15 is 41.
So a team plays 52 games inside its own conference and 30 outside it. That ratio is the reason conference record works as a tiebreaker and the reason the two conferences can drift apart in quality for years at a time. A Western team plays nearly two-thirds of its schedule against the West. If the West is the stronger half of the league, as it was for most of the two decades after Michael Jordan left Chicago, a 45-win Western team and a 45-win Eastern team have not done the same thing.
What the formula guarantees
Every team visits every arena at least once. That is the most fan-facing consequence of the two-game series against the other conference: each of the 15 clubs from the opposite side comes to town exactly once a year. A fan in Portland with tickets to a single Eastern opponent gets one night to see it, and if the visiting star sits out, there is no second chance until the following season. Much of the league's recent rule-making about player rest traces back to that fact.
The formula also guarantees that division rivals see more of each other than of anyone else, though only just. Sixteen division games out of 82 is less than a fifth of the schedule. In the NFL, division games make up six of 17. Basketball's divisions are a scheduling convenience far more than a competitive unit.
The league-wide count
Add it up across 30 teams and the season contains 450 games between the conferences and 780 inside them, 390 in the East and 390 in the West. Inside each conference, 120 of those games are between division rivals. The league publishes every one of those games in August with a date and a tip-off time, less the handful that the NBA Cup leaves open.
Why four conference opponents get three games, and how that group rotates
Start with what a perfectly even schedule would look like. Four games against each of the 14 other teams in the conference is 56. Two against each of the 15 teams outside it is 30. That is 86 games, four more than the calendar has room for.
The league's solution is blunt. It takes one game away from four of the conference series. Those four opponents, always from outside a team's own division, are played three times, and the missing game comes off the home slate in two cases and the road slate in the other two. A team therefore has two conference opponents it hosts twice and visits once, and two it hosts once and visits twice.
Which four? The group changes every year. The league runs the three-game pairings on a rotation, generally described as a five-year cycle, so that the imbalance is shared around instead of landing on the same matchups season after season. The arithmetic fits that description. A team has ten conference opponents outside its division, and four three-game slots a year gives 20 slots across five seasons, enough for each of the ten opponents to fall into the short group twice.
It is fair to call this the untidiest part of the schedule. Two teams fighting for the same seed do not play the same opponents the same number of times, and the difference is decided years in advance by a rotation that knows nothing about who will be good. A club that draws its three-game series against the two best teams in the conference has a slightly easier 82 than a rival that gets those teams four times.
The effect is small. It is also real, and it shows up most clearly in tiebreakers. A three-game series cannot be split, so the head-to-head test always produces a winner, and the team with two home games in that series started with an edge it did nothing to earn. The procedure itself is laid out in our explainer on how the NBA seeds tied teams.
One more wrinkle arrived in 2023. The games that the NBA Cup adds to the calendar in December are, with rare exceptions, conference games, and they are assigned after the group stage is finished. So the split between three-game and four-game opponents is no longer wholly fixed when the schedule comes out in August. For most teams the rotation still decides it. For a few, a Cup result does.
How the NBA Cup turned 82 into 80 plus two
Until 2023 the league announced all 82 games for every team at once. Since the In-Season Tournament began that fall, renamed the NBA Cup a year later, the August release has carried dates and opponents for 80. The last two are filled in during the first half of December.
The mechanism is easier to follow in order.
- AugustThe league publishes 80 games per team. Four of them, played from the end of October through November, double as Cup group games against conference opponents.
- Group play endsEight teams advance to the knockout round: three group winners and one wild card from each conference.
- The 22 teams left outEach is given two more regular-season games in early December against other teams that did not advance, from its own conference wherever the pairings allow.
- Quarterfinal losersEach has played game 81 in the quarterfinal. It plays game 82 against the other quarterfinal loser from its conference.
- SemifinalistsThe quarterfinal is game 81 and the semifinal is game 82. Both count in the standings.
- FinalistsThe championship is an 83rd game. It does not count in the standings or in any player's regular-season statistics.
The NBA Cup structure used since the tournament began in 2023-24. Every Cup game except the championship counts in the regular-season standings.
The design is tidier than it first looks. Group games, quarterfinals and semifinals are all played inside a conference, so every one of them can be slotted into the conference portion of the formula. Only the championship game crosses conferences, and that is the one game left out of the record.
Two teams a year therefore play 83 times between October and April and are credited with 82. The points a player scores in the Cup final appear nowhere in his season line. That is an odd thing for a league so attached to its statistics, and it was a deliberate choice: counting the game would have given two teams an 83-game record and broken every per-game comparison in the standings.
For a fan trying to plan a trip, the practical point is that the first two weeks of December are provisional. A home date in that window might exist or might not, depending on how four group games went. Our explainer on the NBA Cup format covers the groups, the wild cards and the point-differential tiebreaker that decides them.
There is a competitive side effect too. Because the fill-in games pair teams that failed to advance, a strong team that stumbled in group play draws two December opponents from the same pool of also-rans, and a weak one that got hot for a fortnight earns a quarterfinal against a contender. Over 82 games it washes out to almost nothing. It is still the first time since the formula was adopted that part of a team's schedule has depended on its own results.
Who makes the NBA schedule: arena dates, television windows and software
Nobody draws 1,230 games out of a hat. The schedule is built by a small group inside the league office, working from three sets of inputs that pull in different directions.
The first is the buildings. Every team sends the league the dates on which its arena is free. Most NBA arenas are shared with something: an NHL team in about ten cities, a college program in a few, and concerts, conventions, circuses and ice shows everywhere. For years the league asked each club for about 50 workable home dates and built from those. More recently its schedulers have looked at every open date in every building, which gives the software far more room to find a better arrangement.
The second input is national television. The league's broadcast partners hold fixed windows on particular nights of the week, and they want particular teams in them. Opening week, Christmas Day and the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday are filled first, by hand, with the matchups the league most wants to show. A good deal of the remaining schedule is then built around protecting those games. The league has also worked to keep teams off back-to-backs around its national showcases, so that the stars are less likely to sit.
The third is the formula itself, plus the rest and travel limits described in the next section. Every team must get its exact mix of four-game, three-game and two-game opponents, 41 at home and 41 away.
From one man's desk to an optimization problem
For roughly three decades the job belonged largely to one league executive, Matt Winick, who assembled the schedule largely by hand. It was a craft, and much of it was local knowledge: San Antonio's arena went to the rodeo every February, Chicago's to the circus every November, and both teams had to be sent on the road for about two weeks.
Around the middle of the last decade the league moved the work to its analytics staff and to optimization software that can generate and score enormous numbers of complete schedules. The change mattered because of what it made measurable. A human can build a legal schedule. Software can build thousands and rank them by total miles flown, by the number of back-to-backs, or by how often a rested team meets a tired one. Once those things could be counted, they could be reduced, and the league started publishing the counts.
The finished schedule is released in the middle of August. Teams see drafts before then and can raise problems, but they do not get to choose their opponents on a given night, and a request to avoid a rival on the second night of a back-to-back gets a sympathetic hearing and usually nothing else.
Back-to-backs and travel: the rest rules written into the calendar
A back-to-back is two games on consecutive nights. The second one is frequently in a different city, reached by a charter flight that lands after midnight. No feature of the 82-game schedule draws more complaint from players and coaches, and none has changed more in the last ten years.
In 2014-15 the average team played 19.3 back-to-backs. The league then set about cutting them. It lengthened the season at the front end, starting about a week earlier from 2017-18 and trimming the preseason to pay for it, which spread the same 82 games over more days.
The same 2017-18 schedule did away with the stretch players hated most, four games in five nights. There had been dozens of them a season only a few years earlier. There have been none since. The league's schedule announcements now list the patterns it has engineered out, which in recent years have included four games in five nights, along with a ceiling on the number of back-to-backs any single team can be given.
The average has crept back up since 2019-20. The NBA Cup is part of the reason: it pins group games to specific nights in November and clears most of a week in December for the knockout round, and the games displaced by that have to go somewhere. Recent schedules have run above that 12.4 low and still well short of the 19.3 of 2014-15.
Rest advantage and miles
Counting back-to-backs is only part of it. The league also tracks how often a team that played the previous night meets one that did not, which coaches call a schedule loss and the league calls a rest-advantage game. The aim is not to eliminate them, which is impossible, but to hand them out evenly.
Travel has been cut by a different trick. In 2020-21, with arenas mostly empty, the league borrowed from baseball and scheduled two-game sets in which a visiting team played the same opponent twice in one stop. Some of that survived. A road trip now is more likely to be organized by region, with a swing through Texas or down the East Coast, than it was when the schedule was a list of single dates.
None of this has ended the practice of healthy players sitting out. The league answered that with rules instead of schedule changes: a participation policy adopted in 2023 that restricts when teams can rest their stars, and a 65-game minimum for most major awards. The first is covered in our piece on how the load management rule works, the second in our guide to the 65-game rule.
Fixed points on the calendar, from opening week to the final Sunday
Most of the 82 games are interchangeable. A Tuesday in January in Charlotte could be swapped with a Wednesday in March and nobody would notice. A few dates are not like that, and the rest of the schedule is arranged around them.
Opening week. The season begins in the second half of October, usually on a Tuesday, with a small slate of nationally televised games. The defending champion plays at home that night and receives its rings and raises its banner before tip-off. The league now makes a point of giving every team its home opener within the first several days.
Christmas Day. The NBA has played on December 25 since 1947, missing only the lockout winter of 1998, and since 2008 the day has carried five games, one after another from noon Eastern into the night. Selection is by invitation. The league picks ten teams it expects to matter, and being left off is read, correctly, as a verdict.
Martin Luther King Jr. Day. The league has played on the holiday every year since it was first observed nationally in 1986. Atlanta and Memphis, the cities most closely tied to Dr. King's life and death, are regular hosts of afternoon games.
The All-Star break. In the middle of February the schedule stops for about a week. It is called the midpoint and is nothing of the kind: most teams have played well over 50 games by then, and the stretch run after the break is closer to a third of the season. The trade deadline falls a week or so before it, for reasons explained in our guide to how the NBA trade deadline works.
The final Sunday. All 30 teams play on the last day of the regular season. The games are staggered by conference, with one conference's games tipping off together in the afternoon and the other's a few hours later, so that teams competing for the same seed are on the floor simultaneously and nobody gets to watch a rival's result before deciding how hard to play.
A few dates are kept empty. The league does not schedule games on Christmas Eve, has left Thanksgiving Day to football in recent seasons, and traditionally stays dark on the Monday night of the NCAA men's championship game. In recent federal election years it has kept Election Day clear as well.
What sits on top of the 82: preseason, play-in and playoffs
Ask a player how many games he played last season and the true figure for a deep playoff team is well over a hundred. The regular season is the only part with a fixed length. Everything around it varies.
| Phase | When | Games for one team | Counts toward the 82-game record |
|---|---|---|---|
| Preseason | Early to mid October | A handful, commonly four to six | No |
| Regular season | Late October to mid April | 82 | Yes |
| NBA Cup championship | Mid December | 1, for two teams only | No |
| Play-in tournament | Mid April | 1 or 2, for eight teams | No |
| Playoffs | Mid April to June | 4 to 28, for 16 teams | No |
Preseason games are exhibitions. Coaches use them to try lineups and to decide the last roster places, and the results are forgotten by the first Tuesday of the season. Some are played in neutral American cities without a team, and a few are staged abroad. July's Summer League, which is a showcase for rookies and fringe players, is another thing again and is described in our guide to the NBA Summer League.
The play-in sits in an odd place. It decides the seventh and eighth seeds in each conference among the teams that finished seventh through tenth, and it comes after game 82. Its games are neither regular-season games nor playoff games, and the league keeps the statistics from them in a category of their own. The details are in our explainer on the play-in tournament format.
Then the playoffs: four rounds, each a best-of-seven. A champion plays at least 16 more games and as many as 28. The bracket, the seeding and the home-court pattern are covered in our guide to the NBA playoff format.
Stack the maximums and the ceiling for one team in one season is 82 regular-season games, two play-in games and 28 playoff games, which is 112. Add the Cup final for a team unlucky or lucky enough to do it all and the number is 113. No team has come close to that, since a club good enough to win the Cup is rarely in the play-in. A realistic heavy season for a finalist is around 105.
Why does the NBA play 82 games? From 60 in 1946-47 to 82 in 1967-68
Nobody chose 82 on its merits. The number is where a growing league happened to be standing when it stopped adjusting.
The Basketball Association of America, the league that became the NBA, opened in November 1946 with a 60-game schedule. Its founders were arena owners, most of them hockey men, who wanted to fill dark nights in buildings like Boston Garden and Madison Square Garden. The schedule was set by how many of those nights there were. A year later, with money tight and four clubs gone, the league cut to 48 games. Then it climbed again.
Scheduled games per team in the BAA and NBA. Seasons between the points shown kept the earlier length or, in the early 1950s, varied slightly from team to team.
Show the numbers
| Item | Games per team |
|---|---|
| 1946-47 | 60 |
| 1947-48 | 48 |
| 1953-54 | 72 |
| 1959-60 | 75 |
| 1960-61 | 79 |
| 1961-62 | 80 |
| 1966-67 | 81 |
| 1967-68 | 82 |
Through the early 1950s the count wobbled in the high 60s, and in some seasons teams in the same league did not all play the same number of games. From 1953-54 it settled at 72 for six seasons. It went to 75 in 1959-60, to 79 a year later, and to 80 in 1961-62, the season Wilt Chamberlain averaged 50.4 points a game. In 1966-67, with the Chicago Bulls added as a tenth team, it became 81. When Seattle and San Diego joined in 1967-68 to make 12, it became 82.
And there it stayed. That is the surprising part. The league grew to 14 teams in 1968, to 17 in 1970, to 22 with the four ABA clubs in 1976, and by steps to 30 in 2004. Each time, the number of opponents changed and the number of games did not. The formula was rewritten to fit 82, never the reverse. That is why the modern schedule needs its awkward three-game series: the total was inherited from a 12-team league and the 30-team league has been bending around it ever since.
Why it stuck is not mysterious. Forty-one home dates became the basis of everything a franchise sells. Season tickets, arena leases, sponsorship contracts and local broadcast deals were all priced on 41 nights, and after a few years every team's budget assumed them. The records began to depend on it as well. The rival American Basketball Association played 84 games for most of its nine seasons, a detail that still complicates comparisons across the two leagues, as our account of the ABA-NBA merger explains.
The seasons that fell short of 82
Since 1967-68, four seasons have been played to a shorter schedule and one more lost a single game.
| Season | Games per team | What happened |
|---|---|---|
| 1998-99 | 50 | A lockout wiped out the first three months. Play began on February 5, 1999 |
| 2011-12 | 66 | A second lockout delayed the opener to Christmas Day 2011 |
| 2012-13 | 81 for Boston and Indiana, 82 for the rest | One game canceled after the Boston Marathon bombing |
| 2019-20 | Between 64 and 75 | Suspended on March 11, 2020, and finished by 22 teams at Walt Disney World |
| 2020-21 | 72 | A late start on December 22, 2020, after the delayed 2020 Finals |
The two lockouts were labor disputes between the owners and the National Basketball Players Association over how to divide the league's revenue. In both, the owners shut the doors when the collective bargaining agreement expired, and games were canceled in blocks until a deal was reached.
The 1998-99 season was the more damaged of the two. Fifty games in about three months, no All-Star Game, and a schedule that had teams playing on three consecutive nights. The basketball was poor. Scoring fell, legs were gone by April, and the San Antonio Spurs' championship has carried a faint asterisk in some tellings ever since, unfairly, since every team played the same compressed slate.
The 66-game schedule of 2011-12 repeated the back-to-back-to-backs. Every team had at least one. It also showed how hard the full formula is to compress: the league could not give every pairing across the conferences a home-and-away, so a team visited only some of the other conference's arenas that year.
The pandemic seasons
The 2019-20 season stopped on the night of March 11, 2020. When it resumed at the end of July, inside a closed campus at Walt Disney World near Orlando, only 22 of the 30 teams were invited. Each played eight "seeding games" to finish a regular season of sorts. The eight teams left at home never played again that year, which is why the final standings show clubs with anywhere from 64 to 75 games.
The following season started two months late and was cut to 72 games to get the calendar back on track. It is the most recent time the NBA has played fewer than 82, and the league treats its statistics as official in the ordinary way. Per-game numbers from all of these seasons sit in the record book alongside the rest. Season totals do not compare, and the people who keep lists of 2,000-point seasons or 60-win teams have to decide for themselves what to do about 1999.
The case for fewer games, and why it has never passed
The argument against 82 is old and it is made by serious people, including some of the league's most successful coaches. It runs like this. The modern game is faster and covers more ground than the one the schedule was designed for. Players are heavier, they sprint and decelerate more often, and the soft-tissue injuries that wreck playoff series seem to accumulate with workload. Stars miss games to manage that workload. Fans who bought tickets to see them are shortchanged. Fewer games, the reasoning goes, would mean better ones.
The league has taken the idea seriously enough to draft it. In 2019 the NBA office circulated a package of changes tied to its 75th anniversary season: an in-season tournament, a play-in for the last playoff places, and a regular season trimmed to 78 games. The tournament arrived in 2023. The play-in arrived in 2020 and became permanent. The 78-game season was the piece that fell away.
Money is why. A home game is the unit in which most team revenue is earned. Cut four games and every club loses two home dates of gate receipts, concessions, parking and sponsor inventory, and its local broadcast partner loses four nights of programming it has paid for. National television contracts are written around a volume of games as well.
The players have no incentive to push for it either, and this is the part that is often missed. Under the collective bargaining agreement their salaries are tied to a share of basketball-related income, close to half. Fewer games means less income, and less income means a lower salary cap and smaller contracts. A shorter season is a pay cut for both sides of the table, offered in exchange for a health benefit that the league says its own injury data does not clearly show.
There is a quieter objection as well. Every counting record in the sport assumes 82. Shorten the season permanently and the single-season marks for points, assists and wins are frozen out of reach.
So the league has gone around the problem. It kept 82 and changed what surrounds them: a longer calendar, fewer back-to-backs, no four-in-five stretches, limits on resting healthy stars, and a games-played threshold for awards. Whether that amounts to a solution is a matter of judgment. Ours is that 82 survives because it is paid for, and that it will change only when a television contract makes a shorter season worth more than a longer one.
82 against the NFL's 17 and MLB's 162: what one game is worth
The same question gets a very different answer in each American league, and the differences explain a lot about how each sport feels to follow.
| League | Regular-season games per team | Teams | Games league-wide | One game as a share of the season |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| NFL | 17 | 32 | 272 | 5.9% |
| NBA | 82 | 30 | 1,230 | 1.2% |
| NHL | 84 from 2026-27, 82 before that | 32 | 1,344 | 1.2% |
| MLB | 162 | 30 | 2,430 | 0.6% |
One NFL game carries the weight of almost five NBA games. One NBA game carries the weight of two baseball games. A football team that starts 0-3 is in trouble. A basketball team that starts 0-3 has had a bad week.
Hockey played 82 for most of the last three decades, and for a similar reason, since the two leagues share so many buildings. The NHL's move to 84 is covered in our guide to how many games are in an NHL season, and baseball's far longer grind in the companion page on the 162-game MLB schedule.
Raw length is only half the comparison. Basketball is a high-scoring sport in which each team gets around a hundred possessions a night, so the better team wins an individual game more reliably than it does in baseball or hockey, where a hot goaltender or one bad inning can decide things. Put a low-variance sport on an 82-game schedule and the standings become very accurate. By April the best teams have nearly always separated themselves, and a seventh seed that beats a second seed in the first round is a rare event.
That accuracy cuts both ways. It is the strongest argument that the NBA regular season is longer than it needs to be: the league could probably identify its best eight teams in each conference in 60 games. It is also why seeding is trusted, why home court in a Game 7 is seen as earned, and why a 60-win season still means something. A bad team cannot hide for 82 games. Neither can a very good one coast through them without it showing, although plenty have tried.
The long schedule has a cost at the bottom of the standings too. A team that is out of contention by January still has 40 games to play, and the draft rewards losing them. The league has rewritten its draft lottery more than once to blunt that incentive, and the schedule keeps recreating it. More coverage of the league sits on our basketball hub.
Eighty-two is an accident of 1967 that turned into the measuring stick for everything since. Every scoring average, every win total and every argument about the greatest team is expressed in it, which is the last and maybe the best reason the number does not move.