Not one NBL club plays two days in a row this season

Why this was worth a look

The fixture is published as a list of dates and everyone reads their own club's row. I wanted to read the whole thing at once and find out what shape the season actually is, because that is the part no fixture release tells you.

What is in the fixture

The NBL27 regular season is 165 games over 21 rounds, 33 for each of the ten clubs, from 2026-09-19 to 2027-02-14. A A block of fixtures the competition numbers together. NBL27 rounds run from four to seven days and hold between five and ten games, so a round is not a week.round is what the competition numbers, not a week. A The days between one club's game and its next one. Derived from the stored local dates. A turnaround of one day is a back-to-back.turnaround is the gap between one club's fixtures, and ten clubs playing 33 games each make 320 of them.

These numbers use dates and clubs only. Punt's fixture is missing a venue for 19 of the 165 games, including 14 of Sydney's 17 home games, so nothing here counts distance, travel or home-venue splits — those figures would be wrong, and a wrong kilometre is worse than no kilometre. The one exception is round 17, where all five fixtures carry the same arena.

Nobody plays twice in two days

The column that would hold back-to-backs is empty. Of 320 turnarounds, none is one day, 62 are two days and 67 are three, which is the most common gap in the season. The longest is 14 days, and it belongs to the Tasmania JackJumpers.

Two-day turnarounds are not shared out evenly. Illawarra has 9, Sydney and Tasmania eight each, Adelaide, Melbourne United and Perth seven, and the NZ Breakers 3 — the fewest of the ten. That is a real difference in how bunched a season is, and it is as far as a list of dates can honestly go.

One empty week, in late November

The competition stops between 2026-11-22 and 2026-12-02: 10 days with no NBL game anywhere, and the only week of the 22 that holds nothing. The next-longest stretch without a game is 4 days, at the start of February. The fixture records the dates, not the reason for them.

The rest of the season is close to continuous. Rounds 1 and 2 run nine days straight from 19 to 27 September, and from December onwards the league plays through Christmas: round 14 covers 23 to 29 December and round 15 runs across New Year.

Five nights in Perth

Round 17 is the strangest block in the fixture: five games, five nights, all at RAC Arena in Perth, from Wednesday 13 to Sunday 17 January. Only one of the five is a Perth home game. In the other four a club is the listed home side playing in another city — Melbourne United, the Sydney Kings, Tasmania and Brisbane each give up a home date to be there.

• 2027-01-13 — Melbourne United v Cairns Taipans
• 2027-01-14 — Sydney Kings v South East Melbourne Phoenix
• 2027-01-15 — Perth Wildcats v NZ Breakers
• 2027-01-16 — Tasmania JackJumpers v Adelaide 36ers
• 2027-01-17 — Brisbane Bullets v Illawarra Hawks

It is the only round in the season where every fixture sits at one venue, and the only stretch where the competition plays one game a night for five nights running.

What this cannot tell you

A fixture is a plan. Games get moved, and 2 of these 165 had been played when these numbers were read, so a date here is what was stored on 20 September 2026 and not necessarily what happens. Nothing in this article grades a draw or says which club came out of it better, because a list of dates cannot answer that and Punt does not make that call. The 2025-26 NBL season, round by round is what the last completed fixture turned into. If the venue gap is ever filled I would come back and count the travel, which is the part of a draw people actually argue about.