NBA Christmas games

• 1. Introduction

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  NBA Christmas games began in the league's very second season, when the New York Knicks beat the Providence Steamrollers 89-75 at Madison Square Garden on the 25th of December 1947. That same night, a second game was broadcast on WCBS channel 2 in New York, with Stan Lomax and Bob Edge calling the action. What started as regional matchups between geographical neighbors has grown into a five-game national showcase that many fans treat as the unofficial start of the basketball season. How did a single game in 1947 become the NBA's most watched regular-season day? Why do players publicly call it an honor while privately wishing they were home with their families? And who holds the record for the most Christmas Day appearances of any player in league history?

• 2. How It All Began

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  Dr. Jack Ramsay, who coached the Portland Trail Blazers beginning in the 1976-77 season, captured the early spirit of Christmas basketball in a single sentence. "Christmas meant being at home with the family and having a game we always won," he said. "That was a perfect Christmas to me." He went on to set the record for most coaching victories on Christmas Day with 11 wins, a mark that Phil Jackson later matched.

  In the early days of the NBA, proximity drove scheduling. Teams played their nearest geographical rivals to limit holiday travel and give players more time at home. But the holiday's character shifted as television arrived. In the early 1980s, the New York Knicks put on a show across three consecutive Christmas seasons, culminating in hall-of-fame forward Bernard King scoring 60 points in a single game in 1984. That remains the highest scoring total by any player on Christmas Day. Performances like King's convinced the league that the holiday could showcase the sport's very best, and the era of geography-driven matchups gave way to something with a much larger audience in mind.

• 3. Building the Showcase

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  Since 1995, the Christmas schedule has nearly always included the current NBA champions and the teams that competed in the previous season's Finals. The league also works to feature the reigning Most Valuable Player and the sport's other headline players. A clear example came in 2009 and 2010, when the defending champion Los Angeles Lakers hosted games designed to produce head-to-head showdowns between Kobe Bryant and LeBron James.

  No fixed host city or arena is required, distinguishing the NBA tradition from the NFL's Thanksgiving games. Officials from the league and its broadcast partners meet each offseason to map out who plays whom. The Charlotte Hornets stand as the only franchise to have never appeared on Christmas Day at all, a streak dating back to the team's founding in 1988 and continuing through their rebranding as the Charlotte Bobcats from 2004 onward. At the other end of the spectrum, the New York Knicks have played 58 Christmas Day games, more than any other franchise. Their 26 wins are the most by any team, though so are their 32 losses.

• 4. The Games People Remember

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  Patrick Ewing helped the Knicks erase a 25-point deficit to beat the Boston Celtics in 1985, then beat Michael Jordan and the Bulls on a last-second jumper the following year. Scottie Pippen delivered a last-second block in 1994. The first time Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O'Neal faced each other as opponents after the Los Angeles Lakers traded O'Neal to Miami came on Christmas in 2004.

  Phil Jackson became the fastest head coach to reach 1,000 career wins on the 25th of December 2008. In 2011, a league lockout pushed the entire season opener to Christmas Day, and ESPN and ABC analyst Jeff Van Gundy described the unusual collision of events. "It's a different opening day than has ever happened in the past," Van Gundy said, noting that the Dallas Mavericks' championship banner ceremony, LeBron James's return to Miami, and the debut of a new Lakers head coach all landed on the same afternoon. LeBron James passed Kobe Bryant in 2021 to become the all-time Christmas Day scoring leader, finishing that day with 422 points across his career, compared to Bryant's 383. James also holds the record for most games played on Christmas with 20.

  The first Christmas Day game outside the United States took place in 2019, when the Boston Celtics defeated the Toronto Raptors 118-102 at Scotiabank Arena in Toronto.

• 5. Fashion and Fanfare

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  Special uniforms and sneakers have become part of the holiday ritual. From 2009 to 2011, the Knicks wore a green and orange alternate jersey originally made for St. Patrick's Day. During the 2010 game between the Heat and the Lakers, players on both sides wore holiday footwear: Bryant, Pau Gasol, and Lamar Odom wore lime-green Nike sneakers while LeBron James and Chris Bosh wore red shoes with green laces.

  For several seasons, teams wore a patch showing the NBA logo inside a snowflake on the back of their uniforms. The league and Adidas later produced fully themed Christmas uniforms built around concepts like monochromatic designs, labeled "Big Color," and chrome-treated logos, labeled "Big Logo." Stance supplied Christmas-themed socks in two separate seasons. After Nike took over as uniform provider in 2017, the themed gear disappeared and teams shifted to "City" or "Statement" alternates instead. The snowflake patch returned in 2023. In 2025, a new alternate broadcast called "Dunk the Halls" used real-time animation technology to render the San Antonio Spurs and New York Knicks game as Mickey Mouse universe characters, marking the first animated NBA broadcast ever streamed on Disney+.

• 6. On the Air

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  The very first televised NBA Christmas game aired on the 25th of December 1947, when WCBS channel 2 in New York carried the Knicks game at 9 p.m. Eastern. Stan Lomax and Bob Edge called it. Fifteen minutes earlier, Joe Wilson broadcast a game between the Baltimore Bullets and Chicago Stags for WBKB channel 4 in Chicago at 8:15 p.m. Central.

  The first nationally televised Christmas Day game came when ABC broadcast the Los Angeles Lakers against the San Diego Rockets, with Jerry Gross and Jack Twyman on the call. CBS later carried games through much of the 1970s and 1980s. The tradition of multiple networks splitting the day solidified when CBS broadcast a game between the New Jersey Nets and New York Knicks while ESPN carried the Lakers against the Portland Trail Blazers on the same Christmas, with Sam Smith and Dick Vitale on the ESPN call. TNT joined the rotation for the first time in a season when Christmas fell on a Thursday, with Marv Albert and Mike Fratello calling the Washington and Cleveland game at Quicken Loans Arena. That marked the first time all three NBA broadcast partners, ABC, ESPN, and TNT, produced games on a single Christmas Day. Since 2009, ESPN and ABC's Christmas broadcasts have opened with a music video of Mariah Carey singing "All I Want for Christmas Is You," and in 2010 Carey added "Oh Santa!" to the rotation. TNT broadcast its last Christmas Day game in 2025 before ending its NBA coverage, though the Inside the NBA studio show moved to ESPN and ABC through a sublicensing deal between Warner Bros. Discovery and The Walt Disney Company.

• 7. Honor, Obligation, and Debate

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  Doc Rivers, who played Christmas Day games as a Knicks player and later coached the Celtics, framed the occasion the way most participants do publicly. "As a kid, you wanted to be on Christmas," he said before a 2009 game. "I tend to look at it as a reward." Lamar Odom called it "a tremendous privilege to be able to entertain the world." ESPN executive Doug White compared it directly to the NFL's Thanksgiving slot, saying Christmas is "Thanksgiving on the NBA side."

  Not everyone agrees. Orlando Magic head coach Stan Van Gundy requested in 2009 that the NBA stop scheduling Christmas games altogether, saying the day is best spent with family. The league fined him for those comments. In 2010, Lakers head coach Phil Jackson, the son of two Christian ministers and the author of a book on spiritual growth related to basketball, said plainly that he did not think "anybody should play on Christmas Day." From the other locker room that same day, LeBron James said that if players had the choice, they would rather be home opening presents with their children. Even coaches who accepted the tradition voiced mild frustration: Mike D'Antoni joked that he would simply open his presents at seven in the evening instead of seven in the morning.

  The NBA does not schedule games on December 24, giving players and coaches one day with their families before tip-off. Families of those participating typically attend the Christmas games themselves, softening the separation somewhat. Home teams have won at a rate of .654 on Christmas Day, a better mark than the overall home-team winning percentage during the regular season or the playoffs.

• 8. Ratings and the NFL Shadow

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  For decades, NBA Christmas games attracted some of the highest television ratings of any regular-season day, often surpassing every game outside the NBA Finals. Many fans treat December 25 as the true start of the basketball season, in contrast to the actual opening week, which arrives when baseball and football are still commanding attention.

  That position has eroded as the NFL expanded its own holiday presence. Before 2020, the NFL only scheduled Christmas games when December 25 fell on a weekend. Since then, the league has moved to annual Christmas scheduling and signed a deal with Netflix to carry non-weekend games. The shift had a measurable effect: in 2023, the NBA's five Christmas games averaged a 1.3 rating and roughly 2.85 million viewers, a record low, while NFL games on the same day averaged 27 million viewers. In response, ABC and ESPN moved to simulcast all five NBA games in 2022 and again in later seasons, partly as counterprogramming strategy. The 2025 Christmas slate featured the Inside the NBA crew serving as studio hosts for ABC and ESPN for the first time, a consequence of the sublicensing arrangement that kept the show running after TNT exited the league's broadcast picture.