LeBron James joining the Los Angeles Lakers is old news by now. What once felt inevitable did, indeed, happen and now we move on to a world with James on the West Coast.
That means a lot of late nights for LeBron stans on the East Coast, and on Friday they started to get a better idea of what their sleep schedule will look like the next year. The NBA announced its regular season schedule and James fans and, by extension, Lakers fans were the big winners.
James and the Lakers have the most nationally televised games out of the league’s 30 teams, with 32 games on ESPN, TNT and ABC next year.
OK NOW I swear the national TV table is finally right. (The schedule the league sent out had the ABC games listed twice, for some reason.) pic.twitter.com/qjZoAvIc98
— Yaya Dubin (@JADubin5) August 10, 2018
Golden State follows close behind with 34 appearances, while the Rockets have 28 allearances. The Sixers, Celtics and Thunder, meanwhile, each appear 27 times. Every team gets at least one nationally televised game, though six (Atlanta, Brooklyn, Charlotte, Memphis, Orlando and Sacramento) only appear one time each.
NBA TV games, of course, are technically not counted as national television games because the network isn’t as widely available or subscribed to as a behemoth such as ESPN or TNT, but there’s no doubt the Lakers end up on there quite a bit, too.
There’s no telling how the LeBron-led Lakers will actually fare once they hit the court, but it’s safe to say there’s a huge amount of anticipation for the new era of Lakers basketball. Networks are certainly betting big on people watching to see what happens.
