Every Team In The NBA's Showcase Finished Above .500 Except The One Playing Last On Christmas

The NBA writes a paragraph for every game it puts on national television, and those paragraphs are the closest thing the league has to a confession. Somebody at the office has to sit down and explain, in plain English, why this game and not one of the other 1,229. Most of the time the answer writes itself. The Knicks are getting their rings. The Thunder and Spurs played a seven-game conference final. Detroit and Boston finished first and second in the East and neither one reached the conference final, which is a sentence with a whole season's grievance folded inside it.

Here is the one the league wrote on Tuesday about Golden State at the Lakers, in full:

Only two players averaged at least four 3-pointers made per game last season, Steph Curry (4.4) and Luka Doncic (4.0). These two sharpshooters open the season against one another in an all-California clash.

Two rate stats and a geography note. No standing, no series, no rematch, no rivalry, no roster move, nothing the team did. The Warriors are in the sentence the way the state of California is in the sentence, as the place where the person plays.

That is not a slight. It is an accurate description of what the league bought.

The guest list, sorted by last season#

The NBA announced 13 games on Tuesday morning across NBC and Peacock, ESPN, Prime Video and the Christmas Day package on ABC and ESPN. Thirteen distinct clubs appear in them. Here they are with what they did in 2025-26, which is the only completed season anybody has to go on:

Twelve of the 13 finished above .500. Those twelve went a combined 643-341, which is .653, which is a 54-win pace. The thirteenth lost 45 games. (Sort that column any way you like. There is no ordering of it in which Golden State is not last, and on this particular sort it is not close.)

Two of the 13 missed the playoffs, Miami and Golden State, and both were tenth seeds. But the league's paragraph about the Heat is a Giannis Antetokounmpo debut, and a debut is a change in the thing being sold. Both Warriors paragraphs, the October one and the Christmas one, are built entirely on what two individual players have done and are; neither contains a fact about the Warriors as a team.

Anyway.

The obvious objection, which is correct#

Selling a person instead of a team is not some new indignity invented for the Warriors, and anybody about to write me a letter on this point can put the pen down. Philadelphia is on the card three times. Every word the league writes about those three games is about LeBron James: his 24th season, his first game in a Sixers jersey, his home debut, his return to Los Angeles on Christmas, and the possibility that he and Bronny become the first father and son to play against each other. That is a person, not a team, and the league is not shy about it.

The difference is what the person is standing on.

Philadelphia went 45-37, and per the league's own release it then added Jaylen Brown by trade and James in free agency, which is two moves of a kind that shift a franchise's whole range of outcomes. Cleveland went 52-30. Miami went 43-39 and added Antetokounmpo, whom that same release calls one of the biggest names to change teams this summer. In every one of those cases the person the league is selling is standing on a winning record, a roster change large enough to have its own news cycle, or both.

Golden State went 37-45. That is the number the schedule makers had in front of them, it is the only losing one on the card, and the paragraph they wrote about it does not mention it.

The last game, twice#

Both Warriors windows are the nightcap.

October 21 is the second day of the season, not the first. The first belongs to the Knicks raising a banner, and to a tripleheader on NBC and Peacock that does not include a West Coast team at all. ESPN takes the next night with a doubleheader, and Golden State at the Lakers is the back half of it, tipping at 10 p.m. ET.

Christmas Day is five games. The Warriors host Denver at 10:30 p.m. ET, which is the fifth of the five, after the Finals rematch and the Heat-Celtics game and LeBron James returning to Los Angeles and Oklahoma City at Minnesota. By the time it starts, the league has already spent ten and a half hours of Christmas. (Anyone on the East Coast still upright at that point has been watching basketball since noon and has nobody to blame but themselves.)

Both of those are the West Coast slot, and there is nothing insulting about the West Coast slot. It is 7:30 in the evening at Chase Center, which is a fine time to play a basketball game, and the Warriors have owned that window for years because they have the market and the building and the person. The observation is not that the times are bad. The observation is that the league had two showcase packages to fill and it put its only losing team in the two spots where it was not competing with itself.

One more thing about that Lakers game, and it is my favorite small fact in the whole release. Last season's Warriors opener was also at the Lakers, also on October 21, also at 10 p.m. ET. Same opponent, same date, same window, second year running. Golden State won it 119-109 and then lost the other three meetings, finishing 1-3 against Los Angeles.

This has happened once before, and it was worse#

The Christmas game will be Golden State's 14th consecutive appearance on December 25, a streak that runs unbroken back to 2013, and their 16th in 17 years. That is a real institutional fact and the streak is not in question.

What is worth counting is what the club looked like walking in each time. Line up the 14 appearances against the season that preceded each one and the list is mostly what you would expect: 73-9, 67-15, 67-15, 58-24, 57-25, and so on down through a decade of teams that had earned the invitation the ordinary way.

Exactly two of the 14 were scheduled off a losing season. This one, after 37-45. And December 2020, after a 15-50 finish in 2019-20.

That 2020 game is the useful precedent, because it is the same decision made under much heavier conditions. The Warriors had just lost 50 games in a 65-game season. Curry had broken his hand early that year and played five times all season. The league put them on Christmas anyway, in Milwaukee, and the Bucks beat them 138-99 in a game that answered every question anyone had about whether the schedule is a scouting report.

It is not a scouting report. It never was. It is a list of who people will watch.

Forty-three#

Which brings us to the number the release does not print.

The league's case for the October 21 game rests on Curry averaging 4.4 made 3-pointers per game last season, and that figure is correct. He shot 11.3 of them a night and scored 26.6 points, which for a man who turned 38 that March is an absurd line, and is exactly why anybody schedules him at all.

He played 43 games.

Not 43 of 65, the way it was in 2020. Forty-three of 82, in a full season, on a team that finished 37-45, beat the Clippers 126-121 in the play-in and then lost the eight-seed game in Phoenix 111-96 and went home. Doncic, the other half of the sentence the league wrote, played 64 and scored 33.5 a night.

So the honest read of Tuesday's announcement is this: the NBA has committed two of its most valuable inventory slots for 2026-27 to a rate stat, produced across 43 games, by a player who turns 39 next March, on the only club in the showcase that lost more than it won. Every other invitation on the card was earned by a team. This one was earned by a person, and the league is betting he is available on the two nights it needs him.

The rest of the schedule arrives later this week, and it will tell us more: the back-to-backs, the road trips, how many additional national windows the Warriors drew, whether the league doubled down or hedged. For now there are two games on the calendar and one name holding them up.

So here is a call, and it is the one the whole piece is really about. Curry plays fewer than 60 regular-season games in 2026-27.

I want to be straight about what makes that a call rather than a shrug, because his three most recent seasons run 74 games, then 70, then 43. Two of those three are perfectly ordinary availability for a star in his mid-thirties. The 43 is the outlier, and betting on under 60 is betting the outlier was the turn rather than the accident. At 38, going on 39 in March, with 17 seasons of mileage on the most-chased pair of legs in the sport, that is the side I want.

The league has taken the other one, for a Christmas game and an opening-week window, and it did that with its eyes open, because the alternative was scheduling a 37-45 team on the merits.

It is a good name. It has held up heavier things.

Sources#

• NBA.com, "Marquee early-season games tip off 2026-27 NBA Schedule Release," Brian Martin, August 11, 2026, for the full 13-game announcement, the tipoff times, the networks and the league's own writeup of each matchup.
• NBA.com, "Key dates for 2026-27 NBA season," updated August 11, 2026, for the October 20 opening tripleheader and the five Christmas Day matchups and times.
• Basketball-Reference, 2025-26 conference standings, for all 13 clubs' records and playoff status.
• Basketball-Reference, Golden State game logs and franchise season index, for the Lakers season series, the 2019-20 record and the season-by-season list behind the Christmas streak.
• Basketball-Reference play-in box scores, Warriors at Clippers on April 15, 2026 and Warriors at Suns on April 17, 2026, for both scores. The two games are also listed on the league's own key-dates page.
• Basketball-Reference player pages for Stephen Curry and Luka Doncic, for games played, 3-pointers made per game and scoring averages in 2025-26.

Nobody from this site was at any of the games described above.