NEW YORK (AP) — The Oklahoma City Thunder felt slighted last season when they were left off the NBA’s Christmas schedule.
That won’t be an issue this year.
MVP Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and the NBA champion Thunder will be working at home for Christmas this season, playing host to Victor Wembanyama and the San Antonio Spurs as part of the league’s annual Dec. 25 quintupleheader. BetMGM Sportsbook has the Thunder favored by 9.5 points.
The other Christmas games, released by the NBA on Tuesday: Cleveland at New York (favored at -2.5), Houston at LeBron James and the Los Angeles Lakers (-1.5), No. 1 pick Cooper Flagg and Dallas visiting Golden State (-4.5), and Minnesota playing at Denver (-4.5).
Some NBA Cup games are scheduled to be released Wednesday and the full schedule — 80 of the 82 games for all teams — is to be released on Thursday. The remaining two games for each club will be filled in December based on how teams fare in the NBA Cup.
“They make the schedule. We play it,” Thunder coach Mark Daigneault said last season, when asked about his club not being picked for the Dec. 25 lineup. “Our players, I know, would have liked to play on Christmas because that’s such a staple day in the NBA season. But we can’t control that.”
Well, they sort of did control their Christmas scheduling fate this season.
The NBA champions typically get invited to play on Christmas the following season; Oklahoma City beat Indiana in a seven-game NBA Finals last season. The Eastern Conference champion Pacers are among the Christmas snubs this year, after losing Tyrese Haliburton to an Achilles tear that will sideline him for the entirety of this season and seeing Myles Turner opt to sign with Milwaukee in free agency.
The Knicks will be playing their 58th Christmas game, extending their NBA record. The first Christmas game in league history was at Madison Square Garden in 1947.
Boston, Philadelphia and Phoenix played on Christmas last season and didn’t make the Dec. 25 cut this season, replaced by Cleveland (which was the East’s No. 1 seed), Houston (which landed Kevin Durant in an offseason blockbuster from the Suns) and the Thunder.
Cleveland and the Thunder are playing on Christmas for the first time since 2018. The Rockets have a Christmas game for the first time since 2019.
James, if he plays on the holiday, will be making his 20th Christmas appearance in his record 23 NBA season. Only 12 NBA franchises have 20 Christmas games, and James could soon have that many as a player.
And it'll be a big NBA holiday in Texas: All three of the state's teams are playing on Christmas for the first time.
NBC’s return to the NBA broadcast world officially starts with opening night on Oct. 21, when the Thunder (favored by 6.5 points) will receive their championship rings before playing host to Durant and the Rockets in the first game of the season.
That will be followed by Stephen Curry, Jimmy Butler and Golden State taking on James, Luka Doncic and the Lakers (-3.5) in the second game of the NBC doubleheader. Those are the only two games on opening night.
Peacock and NBC will have four games on Jan. 19, which is Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
The matchups: Milwaukee at Atlanta on Peacock at 1 p.m. Eastern, followed by three games on NBC: Oklahoma City at Cleveland at 2:30 p.m. Eastern, Dallas at New York at 5 p.m. Eastern and Boston at Detroit at 8 p.m. Eastern.
Memphis, which typically plays on the holiday, is not this season. The Grizzlies will be returning from Europe, after facing Orlando on Jan. 15 in Berlin and Jan. 18 in London.
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Oklahoma City Thunder's Shai Gilgeous-Alexander listens to remarks during a ceremony honoring the NBA basketball champion, Thursday, Aug. 7, 2025, in Hamilton, Ontario. (Nick Iwanyshyn/The Canadian Press via AP)
BERLIN (AP) — Standing on an open truck making its way through Berlin, Anahita Safarnejad turned to the crowd of Iranian protesters marching behind her and took the microphone.
“No more dictatorship in Iran, the mullahs must go!” she shouted. Hundreds of voices echoed her slogan with the same sense of urgency and desperation.
Across Europe, thousands of exiled Iranians have taken to the streets to shout out their rage at the government of the Islamic Republic which has cracked down on protests in their homeland, reportedly killing thousands of people.
Women have taken a prominent role in organizing the protests abroad, raising their voices against the theocratic government that discriminates against them.
But beyond the anger, there’s also a sense of fear and paralysis. Iran's government has been shutting down the internet and limiting phone calls for days, making it nearly impossible for Iranians in the diaspora to find out if their families back home are safe.
Safarnejad, 34, fled Iran seven years ago. She came to Berlin to study theater but now works in a bar when she's not attending one of the almost-daily protests in the German capital.
Since the demonstrations broke out in Iran in late December, Safarnejad said she's been living in two different realities that are almost impossible to combine. The easygoing hipster life of her new hometown is a jarring contrast to the bloody protests in Iran that she's been following every minute she doesn't have to work, glued to her phone for the latest updates.
While she was initially almost euphoric that the current uprising would finally bring freedom to Iran and she'd be able to go back home, her sense of hope has turned into horror.
Safarnejad hasn't spoken to her brother, also a protester, since communications with Iran were cut off. She's been scouring video on social media showing piles of dead bodies to see if he's among the corpses.
“I'm desperate and don't know how to keep going anymore,” she cried, tears rolling down her cheeks, as she spoke to The Associated Press during Wednesday's Berlin protest.
“I can’t really switch off. I can’t really stop reading the news either," she added, her voice breaking. “Because I’m waiting all the time for the internet to be available so I can get some answers from my family.”
The young woman's horror is felt by many of the more than 300,000 Iranians living in Germany — one of the biggest exile communities in Europe and similar in numbers to France and Britain. Many of them still have family ties to their homeland, even if they left decades ago.
Mehregan Maroufi's Persian cafe and bookstore in Berlin has become a place of solace for Iranians to share their grief without many words — because they know they are all living through the same nightmare.
Maroufi, the daughter of the late Iranian author Abbas Maroufi, welcomes Iranians and everyone else at the Hedayat Cafe, where she serves Persian tea with sweets such as chocolate cake topped with barberries. She lends an ear to anyone who has to get worries off their chest.
“For some, the emotions are still too high and too strong, so to speak, and it’s impossible to talk," the 44-year-old says, adding that she, too, had to force herself to open the cafe on some mornings because the violent images coming out of Iran sucked away all her energy.
“But at least you can find compatriots here. You can talk to a little, and that helps,” she said.
She says she's been listening to and learning from the convictions her fellow Iranians express when they talk about their dreams of an Iran after Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei that — due to the uprising — now seems closer that ever before.
While most in the diaspora agree that the theocracy has to be toppled, ideas of what a new Iran should look like differ widely.
Adeleh Tavakoli, 62, joined a demonstration outside Britain’s Parliament in London earlier this week. She hasn't been back to Iran in 17 years but has spent decades protesting from afar against the Islamic Republic.
But with the latest wave of protests, she hopes that the Iran’s exiled Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, the son of the shah ousted by the Islamic Revolution in 1979, will return to power. If he does, she said, she has her bag packed and is ready to get on the first flight.
“For 47 years, our country has been captured by a terrorist regime,” she said. “We’ve been the voice of Iran. All we want is our freedom and to get rid of this horrible dictatorship.”
For Maral Salmassi, who came to Germany as a child in the 1980s, history explains the calls by exiled Iranians for Pahlavi to lead the country.
“As an Iranian, as someone who comes from this culture and knows its culture and history, I can only say that we have had kings and queens for thousands of years. It is our culture," said Salmassi. She is the chairwoman and founder of the Zera Institute think tank in Berlin, which researches democracy, radicalization and extremism.
She added that Iranians make up a multi-ethnic country and "to bring them all together again, we need a constitutional monarchy that symbolically and traditionally represents our identity and reunites everyone ... and then a democratic, federal parliament where everyone is represented equally.”
However, not everyone is convinced by Pahlavi. Maryam Nejatipur, 32, who also joined the protest in Berlin, thinks her country should avoid a cult of personality.
“We don’t need something like Khamenei again. We don’t need one person,” to lead us, she said, as she burnt a portrait of the Ayatollah and used the flames to light a cigarette — an act that's become a symbol of Iranian resistance.
Safarnejad, who led the recent Berlin protest, agrees.
“I don’t belong to the left, I’m not a liberal, I’m not a monarchist,” she stressed. “I’ve been there for women’s rights, I’m for human rights, I’m for freedom.”
Fanny Brodersen and Ebrahim Noroozi, in Berlin, and Brian Melley in London contributed reporting.
Protester Adeleh Tavakoli, left, demonstrates outside the House of Parliament, in London, Tuesday, Jan. 13, 2026. (AP Photo/Kin Cheung)
People take part in a rally in support of anti-government protests in Iran, Berlin Germany, Wednesday, June 14, 2026. (AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi)
Iranian Mehregan Maroufi poses for a photo before an interview with the Associated Press in her cafe in Berlin, Germany, Thursday, Jan. 15, 2026. (AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi)
Iranian Maryam Nejatipur 32, poses for a photo after a demonstration in support of the nationwide mass protests in Iran against the government, in Berlin, Germany, Wednesday, Jan. 14, 2026. (AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi)
Iranian Anahita Safarnejad, 34, poses for a photo after a demonstration in support of the nationwide mass protests in Iran against the government, in Berlin, Germany, Wednesday, Jan. 14, 2026. (AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi)
