Only Nuggets and Magic Repeat Last Year’s Opening-Night Starting Five

Denver and Orlando alone repeated their opening-game starters, The Associated Press reports.

The comparison pairs each club’s first regular-season game of 2026–27 with its first regular-season game of 2025–26. It asks whether the same five people started those two games. Each team has its own opening date, so this is a comparison of season openers across the league, rather than a single shared calendar night.

Which Five Players Repeated?

The Nuggets’ current opening box and the Magic’s current opening box match their respective prior-season opening records. Denver’s five were Nikola Jokić, Jamal Murray, Aaron Gordon, Cameron Johnson and Christian Braun. Orlando’s were Paolo Banchero, Franz Wagner, Wendell Carter Jr., Desmond Bane and Jalen Suggs.

Denver’s Starters Match While Its Bench Changes

Denver opened at Golden State on October 23, 2025, then at Oklahoma City on October 22, 2026. The five names agree even though the opponent, venue and surrounding bench changed. The 2025 box records Tim Hardaway Jr. and Peyton Watson among the reserves who played. The 2026 box includes DeMar DeRozan and Marvin Bagley III among the reserves.

That is a concrete limit on what continuity means here: the starters match, while the participating roster contains different names. The opening group alone cannot describe every substitution or combination used during the game. Denver’s 96–84 loss to Oklahoma City requires its own account of how those minutes unfolded.

Orlando’s Same Five Have a Specific Baseline

Orlando’s comparison is Miami at the Magic on October 22, 2025, against Atlanta at the Magic on October 21, 2026. Its earlier opening box lists the same five starters as its new one. Bane, for example, counts as a returning opening-game starter in this season-to-season comparison because he was already in that first Orlando lineup a year earlier.

The Magic’s reserve records also changed. Tyus Jones and Anthony Black appeared off the bench in the 2025 opener. Jase Richardson and Nikola Vučević appeared among the reserves in 2026. A team can therefore repeat its opening five while using a different set of supporting players.

Starting and Playing Together Are Different Measures

A starting lineup identifies the players selected to begin a game. Evaluating a group’s performance requires another set of information: its actual shared court time, opponents and results during those minutes. A list of five names supplies none of those denominators. It also does not establish which combination will close a later game or remain available throughout the season.

The four boxes below verify the two repeated groups through official starter-position entries and matching NBA player identities. They do not constitute a new audit of every opening lineup in all 30 franchises; the leaguewide finding remains attributed to AP.