The NBA is starting the 2026-27 season with two heavyweight matchups carrying plenty of recent history.
Opening Night on October 20 will feature the Philadelphia 76ers visiting the New York Knicks at Madison Square Garden, followed by the Oklahoma City Thunder traveling to San Antonio to face the Spurs. Both games will air on NBC.
The first matchup immediately puts the defending NBA champions in the spotlight. New York captured its first championship since 1973 in June, completing a dominant postseason run by defeating San Antonio in five games in the NBA Finals.
Philadelphia provides an especially intriguing opponent. The Sixers and Knicks met in the 2026 Eastern Conference semifinals, where New York swept Philadelphia on its way to the title. The rivalry now receives an even larger stage to begin the new season, with Philadelphia getting an immediate opportunity to measure itself against the team that ended its previous campaign, now with LeBron James and Jaylen Brown.
The Western Conference game offers an equally compelling rematch.
Oklahoma City and San Antonio met in the 2026 Western Conference finals, producing a seven-game series that ultimately sent the Spurs to the NBA Finals. San Antonio won the deciding Game 7 in Oklahoma City, ending the Thunder’s championship defense and establishing Victor Wembanyama’s young team as a legitimate Western Conference power.
That makes the Opening Night meeting much more than another early-season game. Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and the Thunder will get their first opportunity to respond to the team that eliminated them, while Wembanyama and San Antonio begin a season in which expectations will be considerably higher following their Finals appearance.
The scheduling also reflects where the league’s most compelling storylines currently sit. New York enters as the defending champion, San Antonio is coming off a Finals run, Oklahoma City remains firmly among the West’s elite, and Philadelphia gets an immediate chance to challenge the team that controlled the Eastern Conference last spring.
The complete 2026-27 schedule had not yet been formally released when the Opening Night matchups were reported, but October 20 is already shaping up as a statement night.
EDIT:
According to Shams Charania, it will be a triple-header with Detroit Pistons-Boston Celtics in the afternoon, ahead of 76ers-Knicks and Thunder-Spurs.
