Baseball might have left us until the spring but ...

The NBA's two-game sets that are baseball-adjacent are back

Baseball season stretched all the way into November this year and signed off with one of the great Game 7s in any sport.

Maybe I’m stretching now to connect these two topics, but this is about as baseball-related as it gets in the NBA: Orlando plays host to Boston on Friday night and again on Sunday in the first “baseball series” of the new campaign.

You know by now that’s how we (and many others around the league) refer to such two-game sets. The 2021-22 season was the first time that the NBA introduced the concept of a team — like Orlando in this case — occasionally hosting the same opponent in back-to-back games (reminiscent of a series you’d see in baseball) in an attempt to ease some team travel demands and, with any luck, help the road team keep some proverbial gas in the tank at a time when league and team officials have never been more sensitive to trying to maximize player health and availability.

Spurs radio play-by-play voice Dan Weiss tracks the NBA’s baseball series concept as relentlessly as anyone I know and noted in a recent chat that there are only 29 such two-game sets on the leaguewide schedule in 2025-26 compared to the 40 scheduled in each of the past two seasons.

Regular readers, meanwhile, will surely also remember that I have always lobbied against the implementation of this concept because I think it’s a major disadvantage for the home team to see an opponent settle into a city for two games in a row in November like the Celtics will this weekend in the Magic Kingdom. Remember: We’re already in an era when homecourt advantage in the NBA has never been more insignificant; home teams have recorded a composite winning percentage of just .544 or lower four times in the past five seasons as illustrated by the enclosed Basketball Reference chart.

It’s the lowest success rate for home teams in league history.

Yet my theory was proven wrong in a big way last season: Home teams posted a .589 winning percentage in two-game baseball sets last season, going 46-32 overall. There were 15 sweeps by home teams in 2024-25, eight sweeps by road teams and 16 splits ... with the 40 two-game sets originally scheduled ultimately reduced to 39 by the Los Angeles fires in January.

In the four seasons since the concept was introduced, home teams are 265-217 overall for a winning percentage (.549), which is obviously a success rate in line with the modern norm for home teams. That includes 81 two-game sweeps for home teams, 57 sweeps for away teams and 103 splits.

Maybe the most interesting factoid about this season’s baseball series breakdown: Miami is scheduled to participate in five of the 29 two-game sets across the league (three at home and two away) this season. Weiss notes that 13 of the league’s 30 teams, including his Spurs, have one or fewer two-game sets on their schedules. Only six teams last season had just one or zero.

PS — No one ever really asks for this explanation, but I always feel better going the full-disclosure route and acknowledging that, yes, this is a Tuesday Newsletter Extravaganza running on a (gulp) Friday. Tuesday was a travel day for me and the NBA’s first baseball series of the new season starting tonight — in an NBA Cup game no less; court design shown above -- meant running this now made the most sense to me.

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One more time …

In case you missed my latest Sunday Best around-the-league notes:

Or this behind-the-scenes look at the life of a college basketball GM plucked from the NBA which dropped Monday via

The People's Insider

Jake Fischer:

Or Jake's latest on Ja Morant and other around-the-league matters from Thursday:

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(Substack) Note of the Week