Suns, Warriors schedule primetime make-up game

The NBA announced the Suns and Warriors will now match up on March 4 for a newly tacked-on game at the end of each team’s first-half schedule to make up for the earlier postponement. The 8 p.m. start indicates the game will likely be televised nationally by ESPN or TNT, but nothing is confirmed at this time. This is only the second game the NBA has rescheduled after a postponement.

The Suns are 1-0 versus the Warriors this season. The NBA’s grand plan is for each team to play their conference rivals three times, and their non-conference rivals twice to add up to a 72-game schedule.

The Suns had lost/postponed three home games in mid-January after being exposed to COVID-19 by (most likely) the Washington Wizards in that Monday, Jan. 11 loss in DC. After that game, the Wizards went heavily into COVID protocols with half dozen players and coaches testing positive for COVID and didn’t play for almost two weeks.

The Suns were quarantined for several days before being able to resume their schedule a week later, once at least eight players were available to play. Even now almost three weeks after the exposure the Suns are still not quite back to full strength. Dario Saric and Damian Jones are still rounding back into shape, and rookie Jalen Smith has played sparingly.

The rescheduled game on March 4 is now their 35th game of the season. The rest of the schedule for the 72-game has yet to be released because several teams have lost games and the NBA will need to work some magic to get them and the playoffs all done by late July.

Here is your updated Suns schedule.

The Suns still need to make up home games versus the Atlanta Hawks and Indiana Pacers. Both teams are in the Eastern Conference, though, so if “push comes to shove” I’m guessing the league will sacrifice non-conference games if some games cannot be rescheduled easily.

As you can see, the league has a tall task to not only schedule each team’s second half but also to reschedule the postponements, which now stands at 23 games. So far, only two games have been definitively rescheduled.