The NBA schedule is already a headache to put together for Adam Silver and the league. So adding a tournament, with duels known at the last moment, complicates things even more…
For Yahoo! SportsEvan Wasch, the vice-president of the NBA in charge of “Basketball Strategy & Analytics”, also goes into detail on the most complicated point: the schedule of the teams eliminated from the NBA Tournament, for which it was therefore necessary to organize two meetings this week, at the last minute.
Maximize duels between teams from the same conference, but from different divisions
Faced with the challenge that this represented, the Grande Ligue had initially imagined letting the 22 teams which were not qualified for the quarter-finals of the “In-Season Tournament” only play 80 matches in the regular season. Except that the shortfall for the clubs (a home game generates an average of two million dollars) was significant, and the NBA was not enthusiastic about the idea of a week with seven games in total.
For Evan Wasch, it was therefore necessary to set up a computer optimization model, a code capable of quickly “choosing” between the millions of possible combinations for the 22 eliminated teams.
The goal ? Maximize duels between teams from the same conference, but from different divisions. Overall, a team plays three times against a team from its conference, but from a different division. For the NBA, the ideal was therefore to generate a maximum of duels of this type, to go from three to four clashes of this type.
This is how tomorrow evening, Cleveland (Eastern Conference, Central Division) faces Orlando (East, Southeast) or Washington (East, Southeast) receives Philadelphia (East, Atlantic). Overall, most of the duels, Wednesday and Friday, are of this type, even if there are necessarily exceptions, including meetings between teams from different conferences (Detroit – Memphis, Minnesota – Memphis, Chicago – San Antonio) .
The Nuggets, the most disadvantaged?
For the sake of fairness, the NBA also sought to balance home/away games, avoiding that added matches between two teams from the same conference, but from a different division, were played in the hall of a team which already received two matches scheduled out of three. Only the Nuggets will ultimately experience this imbalance, having to play three times against the Clippers, receiving them only once…
And that was without taking into account the problems linked to room reservations, travel or negotiations with broadcasters in order to determine priority meetings.
For Evan Wasch and his teams, the few hours following the final matches of the group stage of the NBA Tournament were busy and stressful as there were so many parameters to manage. Before finally being able to transmit the final schedule, around two in the morning. “It’s above all a relief”concludes Evan Wasch. “Because we can finally focus on the knockout matches.”
Credit: AI-generated image
