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The NBA announced the full schedules for all 30 teams on Monday night and there are naturally some games that stand out above the rest. There are the massive matchups for Christmas Day and Martin Luther King Jr. Day, as the NBA has made those two holidays into two of the biggest days of the league calendar.
There’s also the national TV schedule, which gives priority games to its national broadcast partners that pay billions to the league for the rights to televise the biggest games. That is reflected in the massive number of games featuring the Warriors, Rockets, Cavaliers, Thunder, and Lakers that will be on ESPN, TNT, and ABC next season, but there are also some premier games that don’t pit the very best against each other that will still make for must-see TV.
I’m talking about revenge games, that pit either a team against a rival that beat them in the playoffs the year before or a player returning to a former squad where there may be some hurt feelings on one side or the other. Those games also get prime placement, as the league knows that fans love that added bit of emotion. While there won’t be anything quite like Kevin Durant’s return to Oklahoma City a year ago, there are still a number of great revenge games coming up in the 2017-18 season.