2025-26 NBA schedule marked by Kevin Durant, Anthony Davis returns - ESPN

Two of the biggest return games of the 2025-26 NBA regular season will take place within a single week in November as the vast majority of the schedule for all 30 NBA teams were released Thursday on ESPN's «NBA Today.»

On Nov. 24, Kevin Durant will go back to Phoenix for the first time as a member of the Houston Rockets. A few days later, on Nov. 28, Anthony Davis returns to Los Angeles for the first time as the Dallas Mavericks face the Lakers in an NBA Cup group game.

Each team now knows 80 of the 82 games it will play this season. The opening week and holiday games, as well as the NBA Cup group schedule, were announced earlier this week.

The schedule also highlights the NBA's new partnerships with NBC/Comcast and Amazon as part of the league's 11-year pact with those two broadcast entities alongside ESPN/ABC, which will retain the NBA Finals across the entirety of the new agreement.

Durant's return to Phoenix, which traded the star to Houston in June, will be shown on NBC. Meanwhile, Davis, who was swapped for Luka Doncic in one of the most shocking trades in NBA history in February, will make his return to Los Angeles on Amazon Prime.

The Lakers and Mavericks meet three other times this season: Jan. 24 in Dallas (8:30 p.m., ABC); Feb. 12 in Los Angeles; and April 5 in Dallas.

Speaking of the Doncic trade, on Feb. 1 — exactly one year after the Lakers played at Madison Square Garden against the New York Knicks, only for the trade to happen a short time after the game took place — those two teams will once again square off at MSG on ABC.

The defending champion Oklahoma City Thunder also, not surprisingly, have lots of big matchups, with many of those over the back half of the schedule. While Durant and the Rockets