College Park waits 18 days between games, Westchester 11

The College Park Skyhawks play their 14th and last Tip-Off Tournament game on December 11 and their next game on December 29. That is 18 days between games. The Westchester Knicks finish the same tournament on December 16 and play again on December 27, a gap of 11.

Both clubs started on the same night, November 6, and both play their 14 Tip-Off games inside the East division. One of them fits those games into 36 calendar days and then waits 18. The other spreads them over 41 and waits 11.

The figures come from the published 2026-27 schedule for all 31 clubs as it stood on November 5, 2026. Dates are US Eastern, and a gap is the number of calendar days from one game date to the next. Games can move, so treat the counts as a snapshot. The same schedule is behind our count of road stops and back-to-backs.

A league-wide shutdown

Across the whole league, no club plays a game on any date from December 17 through December 26. The Tip-Off Tournament ends with four games on December 16. The regular season begins on December 27 with 11 games.

What the league does not do is stop every club on the same day. The tournament has no common finish line:

Last Tip-Off game	Clubs
December 11	1
December 12	1
December 13	3
December 15	18
December 16	8

Eighteen clubs finish on December 15 and eight on December 16. Five clubs finish earlier, and all five then wait 14 days or more. The restart is staggered too: 22 clubs open the regular season on December 27, six on December 28 and three on December 29.

How long each club waits

Days between last Tip-Off game and first regular-season game	Clubs
11	7
12	14
13	3
14	4
15	1
16	1
18	1

The median is 12 days, and 21 of the 31 clubs are at 11 or 12. The long end is a short list:

• College Park: December 11 to December 29, 18 days.
• Windy City: December 12 to December 28, 16 days.
• Coachella Valley: December 13 to December 28, 15 days.
• Delaware and Grand Rapids: December 13 to December 27, 14 days each.
• Rip City: December 15 to December 29, 14 days.

Seven clubs wait the minimum of 11 days: Austin, Osceola, Long Island, Maine, Raptors 905, Rio Grande Valley and Westchester.

For 30 of the 31 clubs, this December break is the longest gap anywhere in the season. The exception is Sioux Falls. It restarts on December 29 after a 14-day wait, then has a 15-day gap from February 18 to March 5.

A second, smaller pause in February

Three other clubs, San Diego, Austin and Salt Lake City, have a 10-day gap from February 16 to February 26. League-wide the week of February 15 has 29 games, the lowest of the 13 weeks of the regular season. The next lowest is 33.

The schedule does not say why, and we have not asked. All we can tell from the data is that the pause is real and that it does not hit every club: only four clubs have a second gap of 10 days or more.

What the numbers show, and what we read into them

The numbers show a shutdown that is uniform for the league and uneven for the club: the same 10 empty days for everyone, then a seven-day difference in how long each club has gone without a game when it returns.

What that means for results is our reading, and nothing has been played to test it. A club that sits 18 days might come back rusty, rested, or neither. We have no evidence for any of those. The check is simple once the games exist: compare the first regular-season game of the clubs with the longest breaks against the clubs with the shortest. With 31 clubs and seven at the minimum, there is a fair sample on each side.

Until then the practical point is the calendar itself. If you are tracking a club's return, 22 clubs play on December 27, six on December 28, and the last three, College Park, Rip City and Sioux Falls, wait until December 29.