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On Friday night, we learned that the NBA was planning to have the Lakers (and the other 21 teams taking part in the 2019-20 season restart at Disney World) prepare to resume the season with a series of scrimmages “against a team in opposite conference or an unlikely first-round playoff opponent in same conference.”
On Saturday morning, the league officially released the schedule for those scrimmages, revealing that the Lakers will play exhibition games against the Dallas Mavericks, Orlando Magic and Washington Wizards. The scrimmages will start on July 22, but the Lakers will not begin until the next day, July 23.
Here is the full league schedule:
The Lakers are going to scrimmage against the Mavericks, Magic and Wizards before they resume the season.
— Harrison Faigen (@hmfaigen) July 4, 2020
Here is the full schedule: pic.twitter.com/Lh2gZay5VD
The Lakers plan to travel to Disney World on July 9, and will begin the seeding round with a game against the LA Clippers on July 30 at 6:00 p.m. The Lakers began individual workouts this week to start the process of preparing to resume their campaign.
Dion Waiters, Jared Dudley and LeBron were all back in the gym today: pic.twitter.com/C9UMqx6OhB
— Silver Screen & Roll (@LakersSBN) July 3, 2020
It is not immediately clear if these games will be televised, or if these will just be private scrimmages, but given that the NBA needs all the television content and revenue it can get, it’s hard to imagine they wouldn’t allow these games to be watched on at least one of their televisions partners, or at the bare minimum on teams’ local TV affiliates.
Of the three games the Lakers will play, the Mavericks are obviously the most interesting, because they’re actually a good team that the Lakers could theoretically see in the playoffs at some point if a few things break Dallas’ way. The Wizards and Magic are less good, but will still be decent tests for the Lakers to start to get their conditioning up and get prepared to play games that matter.
I don’t have many more thoughts on scrimmages than this, other than that the frequency of this information coming out is the truest sign yet that basketball is almost back. We’ve nearly made it.
For more Lakers talk, subscribe to the Silver Screen and Roll podcast feed on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher or Google Podcasts. You can follow Harrison on Twitter at @hmfaigen.