The NBA’s hottest team will be playing at home in Los Angeles, and it’s the Clippers, not the Lakers. There’s a finals rematch in Miami, a holiday matinee in Brooklyn, and Kobe vs. the Knicks. Welcome to Christmas, NBA style.
A five-game slate makes up the NBA’s Christmas schedule, which this year comes with the additional bonus of not being the first day back after a lockout forced the cancellation of the opening portion of last season.
Schedule-makers set the matchups long ago, and the league always tries to get some marquee meetings. This year, they pretty much struck gold.
The Clippers are riding a franchise-record 13-game winning streak. The New York Knicks will face their former coach, Mike D’Antoni, when they play the Lakers. Miami and Oklahoma City will be bringing the best records in their respective conferences into their first matchup since the Heat won the title. And Brooklyn and Boston face off, a few weeks after the teams started shoving one another and firing off some insults afterward.
Los Angeles will be the center of the league’s Christmas bash, with two games at Staples Center on the same day, including an opener that features two teams which got off to surprising starts in very different ways. The Knicks — with an Eastern Conference-leading 20 wins so far — venture out to play Kobe Bryant and the Los Angeles Lakers, who reworked their roster over the summer and reworked their coaching staff after a slow early start, firing Mike Brown and bringing in D’Antoni.
Finish that game, clear the court, and basketball fans in Los Angeles then get a second present — the NBA’s best team of late. The Clippers, winners of a franchise-record 13 straight, close the five-pack of games against the Denver Nuggets.
The schedule: Celtics-Nets (9 a.m., ESPN), Knicks-Lakers (noon, ABC), Thunder-Heat (2:30 p.m., ABC), Rockets-Bulls (5 p.m., ESPN) and Nuggets-Clippers (7:30 p.m., ESPN).
— The Associated Press