2016-17 NBA Schedule: Team dashboards

As noted in a previous post, from the start of the season through New Year’s Day, the Los Angeles Lakers play a league-leading 37 games, of which 20 are on the road and eight on a back-to-back. Their schedule stands in contrast to the Cleveland Cavaliers, who have just 32 games, including 13 on the road and seven on a back-to-back. While a simple dashboard can help us see such basic differences in the NBA calendar, it ignores potentially interesting nuances confronted by individual teams, such as distance traveled and days of rest between games.

To capture some of these nuances, I’ve created an enhanced 2016-17 NBA Schedule Dashboard. This version still allows us to analyze the league calendar at various points of the season, but it also has extra tools for deeper dives into individual teams’ games. Here are the Lakers’ and Cavs’ schedules from October 25 through January 1:

A few things stand out when looking at these charts.

First, the Lakers’ 37 games require approximately 25,000 miles of travel through 19 different cities across the entire country. The Cavs’ 32 games are more geographically concentrated. They cover 11 cities, all of which are in the Central and Eastern time zones, and add up to just 7,714 miles (the only total in the NBA below 10,000).

Second, the latter games of the Lakers’ eight back-to-backs are all on the road. In six of these contests, they have a “rest disadvantage” (i.e., their opponents have at least a day of rest). Their December 3 game against Memphis is a quadruple whammy, since it’s on the road, the second of a back-to-back, and the fourth in five nights, with a rest disadvantage. It also comes at the heels of an 818-mile flight from Toronto.

Of the Cavs’ seven back-to-backs, only four are on the road and, perhaps more notably, only three are with a rest disadvantage. This latter point means, in four cases, the Cavs are up against teams that are similarly on back-to-backs.

Lastly, the Lakers have an NBA-low four games in which they have more rest days than their opponents. They’re all scheduled before Thanksgiving. The Cavs have 11 such rest advantages that are split fairly evenly between October/November and December.

Overall, when focusing solely on the logistics of their early-season schedules, it appears that the Lakers have more issues to navigate than the Cavs do. Note the careful phrasing of this observation. While the dashboards provide numerous details to help contextualize the NBA calendar, they do not necessarily imply that the variables impact game results in similar ways. For example, Nick Restifo’s research suggests that, “unlike altitude and rest, pre-game distance traveled doesn’t appear to be on the list of significantly predictive regular season attributes.” It’s arguably useful to have a sense of the types of road trips experienced by teams, but we should be cautious about the links that we draw to wins and losses.

If nothing else, the dashboards further highlight the complexity of the NBA calendar. League officials often point out that the number of possible ways to schedule 1,230 regular season games over a 170-day period is “significantly larger than the number of atoms in the universe.” It’s an esoteric concept, but in viewing the multiple panels of the dashboards, we can begin to appreciate the immense task of league schedule-makers.

Technical Note

In the dashboard, “distance traveled” is estimated by taking the coordinates of NBA cities and applying the Haversine formula. The results differ from “air miles,” which teams tend to cite in their press releases, although not by much.

Additionally, distance traveled measures total miles between the location of the preceding game and the location of the current game. That includes, for simplicity’s sake, the last game before and the first game after the All Star break. Yet we know that many players return home before resuming their second-half games, so some nuances around the mid-February schedule are overlooked.