After plenty of talk about who, when, where and on what network the New Orleans Pelicans would be playing this season, the National Basketball Association has officially released the schedule for each team and after plenty of worry and rumors before the official release Pelicans fans have to be pretty excited.
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The team will have 13 nationally televised games on either ESPN or TNT, and they’ll have eight games broadcast nationally on NBA TV. The Pelicans will open the season with two road games, including the opening night of the season, when the Pelicans head to Golden State on October 27 to take on the defending champion Warriors on TNT.
The Pelicans will host their first home game of the season on October. 31 in a rematch against Golden State at the Smoothie King Center at 6:30 p.m. It’s only the second time in franchise history that New Orleans has been scheduled to play on December. 25. The game will be the first Christmas Day game for New Orleans since the 2008-09 season. Perhaps more notably, the Pelicans do not have any instances on their entire schedule where they must play four games in five nights. Last season, the Pelicans had just three Thursday games. New Orleans will play nine Thursday games in 2015-16, by far the most it has had in recent memory (eight of those nine are after the NFL’s Thursday Night Football slate concludes). 1 when New Orleans plays host to Minnesota, Detroit, Milwaukee, Houston, Sacramento, Brooklyn and Memphis.
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While this two-week stretch features three title contenders -road games at the Los Angeles Clippers and Houston Rockets precede the Cleveland Cavaliers lone trip to New Orleans – it also provides a series of opponents coming off of playoff appearances or with legitimate aspirations to get there this year.
