The 2025-26 NBA season gets underway Tuesday night, and there are plenty of storylines right off the bat.
While most of the league’s 30 teams open up on Wednesday, four will take the floor tonight. Two matchups featuring Western Conference powerhouses are on tap for the NBA’s opening act.
The first game showcases the defending champion Oklahoma City Thunder hosting the Houston Rockets, who are coming off a 52-win season and No. 2 playoff seed in 2024-25.
In the offseason, the Rockets traded for Kevin Durant, who will make his team debut tonight against the franchise that drafted him and gave him the platform to launch his Hall of Fame career.
In the nightcap, the Los Angeles Lakers will take on the Golden State Warriors in a California showdown. The Lakers, who are opening up at home, will be without the services of LeBron James, who remains out with a sciatica injury.
In an added layer of excitement, tonight marks the NBA’s return to NBC after a 23-year hiatus.
Tip-off times, TV schedule for NBA opening night
- Houston Rockets at Oklahoma City Thunder, 7:30 p.m. ET, NBC and Peacock
- Golden State Warriors at Los Angeles Lakers, 10 p.m. ET, NBC and Peacock
The ‘NBA on NBC’ is back
If you’re like the author of this piece and came of age as a basketball fan in the 1990s, the “NBA on NBC” is a hoops institution. All it took was reading that sentence and you can probably hear “Roundball Rock” playing in your head.
You can hear it on television again tonight as well. NBC announced in the spring that John Tesh’s iconic theme song would be returning to the air along with its NBA coverage.
“As soon as our folks got the NBA, that was mission number one, to get that back immediately,” Tommy Roy, a longtime NBC basketball and golf producer, told The Athletic. “That piece of music has such a different feel from any other piece of theme music that’s out there. … It just fits perfectly.”
In total, NBC will air 100 regular season games, plus a segment of playoff action, including the Western Conference Finals.
The network’s lead broadcasting team–play-by-play man Mike Tirico, analysts Reggie Miller and Jamal Crawford and sideline reporter Zora Stephenson–will be on the call for Rockets-Thunder Tuesday.
Noah Eagle will handle play-by-play duties for Lakers-Warriors, with former NBA star Grant Hill serving as an analyst and Ashley ShahAhmadi reporting from the sideline.
Other members of the NBC’s broadcasting crew include NBA legends Carmelo Anthony, Vince Carter and Tracy McGrady in the studio, with none other than Michael Jordan himself providing special guest analysis in his own segment with Tirico.
