NBA streams

NBA guide

NBA basketball, night by night

From the first exhibition games in October to the final game in June, this page carries the NBA games we have streams for. Games already under way are pulled to the top and marked LIVE. Underneath, each date of the coming week gets a heading of its own, and that night's games run from the first tip-off to the last.

Basketball nights are long. On a full slate the first games tip at 7:00 PM ET and the last West Coast games begin about three and a half hours later, so a single date can hold a long list. Pick a game, and its stream rows unlock an hour before tip-off.

The shape of an NBA season

October to April

A short run of exhibition games fills the first half of October, and the regular season opens in the second half. Each team then plays 82 games before mid-April, often three or four a week with plenty of back-to-back nights. Some dates on the calendar look different from an ordinary weeknight:

• NBA Cup group games on selected nights in November, followed by knockout games in December. The semifinals and final have so far been played in Las Vegas.
• Christmas Day, with a full slate starting around noon ET and running late into the night.
• Martin Luther King Jr. Day in January, with games through the afternoon and evening.
• The All-Star break in mid-February, when the regular season stops for several days.

Play-in and playoffs

In mid-April the teams seeded seventh to tenth in each conference meet in the play-in tournament. These are single games, and they settle the last two playoff places on each side. Sixteen teams then play four rounds, and every series goes to the first side with four wins. The last round, the Finals, is played in June. The league tends to fix the times of later games in a series at short notice, so playoff dates on this page fill in as each series moves along.

Tip-off times to expect

An NBA game usually lasts around two and a quarter hours, and that is also how long the LIVE label stays on. A close finish with plenty of fouls, or a tie that brings five-minute overtime periods, can run past it, so the label may read Ended while the game is still going. Trust the stream over the label; nothing gets locked when it changes.

Using this page well

• Following one club? Scroll down the dates until its name appears, then open that game page in good time. It unlocks on its own an hour before tip-off.
• Some games come with more than one broadcast, for example a national feed and a team's local feed. Where we know which is which, the row names it, and you can pick the commentary you prefer.
• Each game page ends with a short run of the next NBA games, which is the quickest way to hop from an early tip-off to a late one without coming back here.
• The WNBA, college basketball and the EuroLeague have no tile of their own. Look for them on More sports.

Watching from outside the US

For most of the season a 7:30 PM ET tip-off is 12:30 AM in London and 1:30 AM in Paris, so in Europe the NBA is mostly a late-night habit. Weekend afternoon games are the friendly exception: a 3:30 PM ET Sunday game starts at 8:30 PM in London. You do not have to work any of this out yourself. Open a game page and it shows the tip-off on your own clock, right under the Eastern time.

Daylight saving starts and ends on different dates in the US and Europe, so for a couple of weeks in March and around the start of November the gap shrinks by an hour. The game page takes care of that too.

NBA questions