Each year, when the regular season calendar falls, it is analyzed to find out which teams will have the most “back-to-back”, the least rest, the most trips… And this season, as in 2020/2021 , with in addition the small novelty of the matches “return”.
But how is this rich calendar of 1,230 matches, spread over six months, constructed? In a very detailed article, The Athletic posed the question to Tom Carelli, who handles this topic for the NBA, and Evan Wasch, who is responsible for advanced statistics.
“Fortunately, we are helped by a computer which has a very powerful system which reveals billions of possibilities”, explique Evan Wasch. “And he shows us the only possibilities that meet the objectives we have set. This is the first draft and we start from that. It’s around two weeks of work between the first calendar that comes out of the computer and the moment it is unveiled. There are what, 20-25 drafts, between our modifications, the comments of each team, the availability of the rooms etc. “
Work in collaboration with television channels
It’s a painstaking job with all these dates, deductibles and combinations. Especially since it is then necessary to discuss it with the television channels to organize the broadcasting of the matches.
“We have someone, Pat Harrel, who works in Evan’s team”, continues Tom Carelli. “His job is to keep an eye on the computer, observe the models we’ve seen and change if it doesn’t go the way we want to take. Sometimes it only takes a few minutes. We look at the draft and we think we can’t play that Clippers game in Boston at that time. So we have to correct that, we throw this draft away and make another one. And we talk to ESPN and Turner all the time. “
Everything is a matter of balance for men who work on this schedule, and sometimes common sense.
“The worst way to build a calendar is to isolate the 41 away games”, recall Evan Wasch. “Because then, that’s 82 trips to be made, some of which will be very, very long. So of course, when a team crosses the country, they play several matches. We are not going to the east coast for one game, but for three, four or five, because it is more profitable. Even in his own conference, we’re not going to ask the Clippers to go to Oklahoma City, or Phoenix or San Antonio, for a game. Why not bring them together? “
A color code for “back-to-back”
This raises the thorny question of “back-to-backs”, which are less and less numerous, season after season, for a few years now.
The proof: in 2014, each team played around 20 and seven years later, the average has dropped to 13.5. A notable difference for the organizations of the players, but Tom Carelli and Evan Wasch insist that eliminating all these streaks of two matches in two days would make no sense.
“There are 82 games during the season and if we take out the six days of All-Star Break, Christmas and Thanksgiving, that’s about 170 days of competition”, calcule Evan Wash. “So the teams play on average every other day. So if we eliminate the back-to-backs, you have to play every two days and then there are no more two or three days between matches. And it will be very complicated in terms of the availability of rooms. Not to mention that, without back-to-back, the teams would have no more days to train. “
The difficulty for the league is then to offer balanced “back-to-back”. We must avoid a team playing its second game in two days after a long trip against, for example, a team that is at home and has not played for three days. For that, the NBA has set up a color code: green for what is acceptable, yellow for what is steep, but still acceptable, finally red for what is unacceptable.
“If a team played the night before and the opponent did not, then we consider that there is additional fatigue for the first team”, raconte Evan Wash. “With Tom Carelli, we put these colors in place for each back-to-back, with the distances between each city. A very good example is the back-to-backs in Portland and Denver. The teams told us that it was incredibly difficult because the trip was very long, the Denver airport is an hour from the city center, there is the altitude too… So now it’s a back-to- back red and it is forbidden in the calendar. “
