How to plan for the week of Jan 25 – 31, 2016

If you are a sports fan or if you live with a sports fan then your weekly schedule becomes inextricably linked with what sporting events are on at what times during each week. The conflict between missing a sporting event for a poorly committed to social event and missing an appealing social event to watch a game is an important balancing act in any kind of romantic, familial, or business relationship between a sports fan and a non-sports fan. To help facilitate this complicated advanced mathematics, Dear Sports Fan has put together a table showing the most important sporting events of the upcoming week. Print it out, put it on your fridge, and go through it with your scheduling partner.

For full coverage of all the NHL and NBA games, see our NHL forecast and NBA forecast.

Download a full-size copy here.

Monday: It’s a good day for living on the west coast or being a vampire. The best of today’s sports start at 9 p.m. with the Australian Open, which continues through to around six in the morning, and 10:30 p.m. with a matchup of the best two teams in the NBA, the Golden State Warriors and San Antonio Spurs.

Tuesday: A relatively uneventful day of sports, to be honest.

Wednesday: Today has the same format as yesterday: soccer, hockey, tennis, but each one is slightly more compelling than Tuesday’s version. I’m particularly looking forward to a chance to see by far the best team in hockey right now, the Washington Capitals, try to deal with a physical and desperate Philadelphia Flyers. In tennis, the Australian Open semifinals begin.

Thursday: I just want to register a complaint to the sports gods. With all of the national sports channels, how can it be that no one is televising the NCAA men’s basketball game between Iowa and Maryland, two top 25 teams. Pah.

Friday: Date night! One of the joys of the FA Cup soccer tournament in England is that you get to pull for true Davids like Derby County in games against insane Goliaths like Manchester United. Come on Derby!

Saturday: If you wake up early or are having trouble sleeping, turn on the Australian Open and catch the women’s finals. If you don’t get much sleep, don’t worry, you can spend the rest of the day blearily and happily in front of the TV, watching excellent basketball games between Louisville and Virginia and Kentucky and Kansas in men’s college basketball, and between the San Antonio Spurs and soap-operatic Cleveland Cavaliers in the NBA.

Sunday: Sports fans everywhere mourn the first Sunday in 20 weeks without a single real NFL football game. Instead, we get the men’s Australian Open finals in tennis, a sub-par nationally televised NBA game, a nice men’s international soccer friendly between the U.S. and surprisingly dominant Iceland, and a couple of all-star games. I’m actually interested in watching the hockey one, because they’ve gone to an all three-on-three format which should truly showcase the talent on-hand.

Caveat — This forecast is optimized for the general sports fan, not a particular sports fan. As such, your mileage may vary. For instance, you or the sports fan in your life is a fan of a particular team, then a regular season MLB baseball game or MLS soccer game may be more important on a particular day than anything on the forecast above. Use the calendar as a way to facilitate conversation about scheduling, not as the last word on when there are sports to watch.

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