Just as the NBA did way back in October of 2019 when this season started, the league plans on showcasing Zion Williamson in an early game, followed by another matchup of Clippers-Lakers to cap off the first night of NBA action at Walt Disney World on July 30.
After Williamson’s Pelicans play the Utah Jazz for the first game, the Lakers and Clippers will play in their fourth regular-season match-up of the season at 6 p.m. local time in Los Angeles, 9 p.m. at Disney World. The first two games of the NBA’s restart will be broadcast on TNT.
After facing the Clippers, the Lakers will face the defending champion Toronto Raptors (August 1), Utah (August 3), Oklahoma City (August 5), Houston (August 6), Indiana (August 8), Denver (August 10), before finishing with the Sacramento Kings on (August 13). Of the eight games the Lakers have to close the regular season, only one of them, their last game against the Kings, will come against a team that isn’t currently projected to make the playoffs.
The first round of the NBA playoffs will begin on August 17, with the NBA leaving August 15-16 available for potential play-in series for the 8th seed in each conference.
Below is the methodology that the NBA used in creating the 8 seeding games for every team.
The 88 seeding games, which were selected from the remaining 259 regular-season matchups, will count toward the final 2019-20 regular-season standings and regular-season statistics. In the first step of the selection process for the seeding games, the matchups were chosen chronologically, starting from March 11, except in these instances:
- A matchup featured a non-participating team
- A matchup resulted in either team in the matchup exceeding eight total games
- A matchup prevented any participating team from having eight feasible matchups
The Lakers have a tough schedule but with 5.5 games between them and the Clippers for first in the Western Conference, they don’t need to do much to clinch the top seed in the West. But their work will be considerably harder to catch the Milwaukee Bucks, who have a three-game lead for the NBA’s best record. However, with the playoffs being played at a neutral site, beating out the Bucks for homecourt advantage means considerably less than it would in a normal playoff scenario.
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