Los Angeles Lakers will open their 2021-22 regular season with a three home game stand at Staples center. Lakers will welcome Golden State Warriors on opening night.
LeBron. Steph. AD. Draymond. Russ. Klay? No need to wait for a big game! On Oct. 19, the Warriors come to town for a rematch of last season’s play-in game, featuring two teams that have a good chance of meeting far later in the 2022 postseason.
In fact, 12 of LAL’s first 15 games will be at Staples Center. A road B2B at SAS and OKC (Oct. 26/27) and 1-game trip to POR (Nov. 6) are the only three road games until a 5-game trip takes the team into Thanksgiving.
Now, there was almost no home court advantage last season for the Lakers, who spent most of the campaign without fans in the building. And, they had identical 21-15 records at home and on the road. Utah, on the other hand, had a large number of fans in attendance for a good chunk of the season, and they went 31-5 at home and 21-15 on the road.
This fact might be more important: of the first 12 home games, only three come against playoff teams from last season (PHX, MEM, MIA).
SCHEDULE Highlights
- Back-to-back contests have gone down year after year over the last several seasons, to a low of 12, which is what the Lakers have on the books once again. That matches their 2019-20 output, and remains below the league average of 13.7 B2B’s. It’s also considerably down from 18 in 2015-16, which was about average at that time.
- Of those 12 B2B’s, two of them feature no travel, with a home B2B vs. SAS and CHI (Nov. 14/15), and then vs. POR and “at” LAC.(Feb. 2/3).
- L.A.’s longest road trip will last 10 days, spanning six cities from Jan. 21-30: ORL; MIA; BKN; PHI; CHA; ATL.
- The longest homestand is from Dec. 31 to Jan. 9, covering five games (POR, MIN, SAC, ATL and MEM) and 10 days. They have another 5-gamer from Nov. 8-15 (CHA, MIA, MIN, SAS and CHI), with that one lasting eight days.
- The Lakers are set to fly nearly 47,000 miles this season on their Delta charter, leaving plenty of time for film breakdown, social media monitoring, movie watching, sleeping, podcast consuming, magazine reading or … eating. The fewest miles any team in the West will fly is 39,000, and the most 51,000, leaving LAL towards the heavy end.
- In February, the Lakers don’t have a single game outside of the Pacific time zone. Road games are at LAC, at POR and at GSW.
- With National TV games always heavy for the Lakers, L.A. has 56 percent of their home games coming on Friday (11), Saturday (3) and Sunday (9), well above the league average of 45 percent. That leaves the Lakers just two home games on Thursday, and four on Monday.
- Speaking of TV … national exclusives aside, all Laker games will be on Spectrum SportsNet, with Bill Macdonald and Stu Lantz on the call, and yours truly on the sideline.
SOURCE : Los Angeles Lakers
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