The Wolves’ 2019-20 schedule is out and, spoiler alert, they will be playing every team! While the NBA schedule release doesn’t come with the intrigue of the NFL schedule when each team plays just 16 games, there are still some interesting takeaways looking at who, where and when the Wolves will be playing in the upcoming season.
March Mayhem
While the Wolves don’t have any single road trips that stand out as particularly brutal (with all due respect to back-to-backs at Denver and at Portland in December), their schedule towards the end of February and into March is a tough one. Starting February 23 they play 11 of 15 on the road, including trips to Houston, Portland, Denver, Miami and Utah. By that point in the season the playoff push will be in full swing—these games are going to matter.
Last season the Wolves were just 11-30 on the road. They’ll need to improve that this season. Luckily, the hardest part of their road schedule comes late in the season after the team has had time to gel and start playing their best basketball. This long road stretch also comes directly after All-Star break so the team should be well-rested.
A Tough Divisional Schedule
Outside of playing every Eastern Conference team twice and every Northwest Division team four times, the Wolves play four games against six teams and three against four teams from the rest of the Western Conference.
It’s hard to predict exactly how good teams will be at this point in the year, but the Wolves have some tough matchups among the teams they will face four times. Those teams include the Clippers and Rockets as well as the Mavericks, Kings, Suns and Spurs. That means that the Wolves face the Warriors, Lakers, Grizzlies and New Orleans only three times.
Put together your top-10 games of the 2019-20 season here.
While parsing these individual contests out like this might be a bit of an empty exercise before anyone has played any games, it’s important to keep an eye on things like this. However, the most important thing is that the Wolves still play every team in their division four times—a tough task when your division-mates are the Nuggets, Blazers, Jazz and Thunder. Though the Thunder should be worse than they were last year the other three either maintained or improved in the offseason. Nobody ever said this was going to be easy but if it were, the NBA championship wouldn’t be such a big deal.
Starting And Ending In Style
The Wolves play some high-profile games towards the beginning and end of their season. They will be the first team to play the new-look Brooklyn Nets, starting their season in Brooklyn on Wednesday, October 23. Then that weekend the Wolves play their home opener against Jimmy Butler and the Miami Heat.
At the end of the season the Wolves travel to L.A. to play the Lakers and Clippers on back-to-back nights for their third-to-last and second-to-last games of the season. They close out the season at home hosting the Knicks.
While all those games (with the exception of the Knicks, sorry N.Y. fans), should be tough it’s also very fun to play meaningful games at the beginning and end of the season. This should be an exciting campaign for the Wolves with the chemistry of the team looking very strong even many weeks before the beginning of training camp.