NBA Finals date set

The 2026 National Basketball Association Finals will open on Wednesday, June 3, with Game 1 on ABC. (nba.com) The league’s official Finals calendar runs through a possible Game 7 on Friday, June 19, and every game is scheduled for 8:30 p.m. Eastern time. (nba.com) The postseason before that is already mapped out: the SoFi National Basketball Association Play-In Tournament runs April 14 through April 17, and the first round starts April 18. (nba.com) The play-in tournament decides the No. 7 and No. 8 seeds in each conference, so those four single-elimination results lock the last open spots in the 16-team bracket. (nba.com) The conference semifinals are scheduled to begin May 4 and can move to May 5 if first-round series run long, according to the league’s key-dates release. (nba.com) The Eastern Conference finals are set to start May 19 and the Western Conference finals on May 20, putting the Finals on a fixed June 3 start even as earlier rounds can slide by a day. (sports.yahoo.com) ABC remains the exclusive United States television home for the championship round, while this year’s play-in games are carried exclusively on Prime Video. (nba.com 1) (nba.com 2) The regular season ended on April 12, so the league moved from 82-game standings into the four-day play-in window without a long break. (nba.com) That June 3 opener now serves as the league’s postseason target date: first round in mid-April, conference finals in late May, and the Finals in the first week of June. (nba.com)