Predicting when the NBA Schedule will be released

We get it Suns fans, we really do. The Olympics are great and everything, but they're just not quenching your thirst for basketball in The Valley. If anything the national team heroics of Kevin Durant - and the continued aweson play of Devin Booker - is making you miss them even more.

We do know when the 2024-25 regular season is due to begin, but you still have some time to wait yet. Opening Night due to commence on October 22nd, ensuring the players suiting up for their national teams have some time away before training camps open up in the near future.

But can we predict when the regular season schedule itself is going to drop?

In order to give this our best shot, we need to go back and look at previous seasons. Since Covid ended and basketball returned back to the normal scheduling of events, the 82 game slate has dropped sometime between August 17th - 20th.

Last season it was August 18th, which was a Friday. In fact in two of the last three years, the schedule has dropped on that day. Does that give us some more of clue as to when it'll be revealed? Possibly, and there's a good reason to earmark both August 16th and 23rd as two dates to look out for this time out.

Depending on the logic here, the NBA could pounce on the end of the Olympic Games on August 11th, by scheduling their realease for the following Friday. That would give everybody a chance to catch their breath and talk about everything that went down in Paris, before moving swiftly on to the NBA and talking about the matchups.

But maybe they'll wait until the 23rd, to ensure every angle from the games is dissected and fans have a bit more time to recover, before getting into who is playing who and when next season. When you think about it - and assuming Team USA wins gold - there will still be lots to talk about as a result of the substitution patterns and DNPs that head coach Steve Kerr has used even to this point.

Every week after August 16th the NBA doesn't reveal the slate, is also flirting more with the upcoming NFL season. The league typically views Christmas Day as the unofficial opening night of the league because that is when interest begins to ramp up - and once the Super Bowl wraps up in early February - the league really takes off.

Right now NFL teams are returning to camp, and that is taking up valuable space on the sporting news cycle each day. But what if the league pivots and goes back to 2022, when the schedule dropped on a Wednesday? Nothing like dropping key info on hump day to get everybody talking.

This also increases the likelihood of talk shows breaking down the matchups between Wednesday and Friday, whereas some national broadcasts don't have shows going out live at the weekend. Owning that part of the summer makes sense as well, as we'll be only two months away from the season getting back underway again.

Let's put our money where our mouth is then, and say that the NBA is going to release their schedule on Wednesday, August 21st this season. The previous week is too close to the Olympics finishing, and the following week is basically September. But nestled in there, well it makes a lot of sense. Not long to wait then.