The 2026/27 NBA season is here and Sky Sports viewers have lots to look forward to. With up to 130 live regular season games, plus matches from the playoffs including the Conference Finals and NBA Finals, there is a feast of live action heading your way. All bases are covered with five live games on Christmas Day, plus coverage of All-Star Weekend and MLK Day, so with no further ado, here's your guide to some of the biggest moments this season… The most immediate - and perhaps the most unmissable - instalment of NBA on Sky is the league's opening night on Tuesday.
The Detroit Pistons - who topped the Eastern Conference last year with an impressive 60-22 record - play host to the 2024 champions Boston Celtics at 8pm on Sky Sports Mix. The Celtics are sporting a new-look side featuring Paul George after his arrival in a high-profile trade that facilitated the departure of last year's leading scorer Jaylen Brown. Please use Chrome browser for a more accessible video player Later that evening, Brown joins up with LeBron James, Joel Embiid, and the rest of his new Philadelphia 76ers team-mates as they travel to Madison Square Garden to face the reigning champion New York Knicks.
The slate ends with yet another fascinating match-up: a rematch of last year's seven-game epic Western Conference Finals series between reigning MVP Shai Gilgeous-Alexander's Oklahoma City Thunder and Victor Wembanyama's San Antonio Spurs. Christmas Day is already a staple in the NBA calendar - but this year in particular is a feast for UK fans, with five games across 12 hours of live basketball on Sky. The day kicks off with a rematch of the 2026 Finals - Wembanyama's Spurs will look to exact their revenge on Jalen Brunson's Knicks in New York at 5pm, before Giannis Antetokounmpo's Miami Heat visit the Celtics in Boston.
Later, LeBron returns to Los Angeles as an opposing player for the first time in eight years to take on the Lakers at Staples Center, with the Thunder playing Anthony Edwards' Minnesota Timberwolves and the Denver Nuggets taking a trip to San Francisco to face Steph Curry's Golden State Warriors in the early hours of the morning. All-Star weekend - the NBA's mid-season showpiece - will once again be shown live on Sky. The NBA All-Star game on Sunday night headlines the weekend - but there are five other events for fans to get stuck into across the three-day event The All-Star weekend kicks off with the Rising Stars game on Friday, with its own round robin featuring a draft selected by a plethora of honorary coaches and NBA legends to be selected closer to the time.
The four teams are made up of players in their first and second years in the NBA - last year, the field was headlined by Mavericks No 1 pick Cooper Flagg, bar one team, which is made up entirely of players from the NBA's development affiliate, the G-League. Saturday features the Shooting Stars contest, the three-point contest and the dunk contest. If that wasn't enough, Friday's action finishes with the NBA All-Star Celebrity Game, before the Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) classic takes place early on the next day.
The play-in tournament at the beginning of April - taking place just after the end of the regular season, but before the playoffs - represents one of the most emotional and consequential weekends of the NBA season. While the teams that finish Nos. 1-6 in the standings of each conference are guaranteed a playoff spot, the teams that finish Nos. 7-10 in the standings are entered into the play-in. These teams will battle for the seventh and eighth playoff seeds.
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