A simple tool to analyze the NBA schedule
In analytics circles, the NBA schedule has taken on a life of its own. The 2016 Sloan Conference featured a standing-room-only presentation from Evan Wasch, the league’s Senior Vice President of Basketball Strategy and Analytics, who discussed the challenges of balancing player wellness, competitive quality, network partnerships, arena availabilities, and many other factors over 1,230 regular-season games. ESPN The Magazine recently showcased Tom Haberstroh’s essay on the “cruel, unrelenting, back-breaking, knee-busting anti-logic” of the NBA schedule. Here, at Nylon Calculus, the impact of rest on player and team performances has been an ongoing research topic through the years.
Given the importance of the NBA schedule, I’ve put together a simple dashboard that allows us to analyze a few calendar-driven measures at any point during the 2016-17 season.
As we can see, the dashboard focuses on game location and days of rest, with the measures expressed in ways that highlight potential disadvantages for a team. It shows how many games are played on the road, represent the second game of a back-to-back, and signify the fourth game in five nights. It also shows what Ed Küpfer might call “rest disadvantage” — that is, whether a team has had fewer days of rest than its opponent as they enter their game. Altogether, the dashboard gives us a decent glimpse of schedule difficulty within a specified time period.
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Let’s put the tool to use. If we filter games from the start of the season through New Year’s Day, we see that the Los Angeles Lakers play a league-leading 37 games — three more than the average team. Of these 37 games, 20 are on the road (tied for the most in the NBA), and eight represent the second game of a back-to-back. Moreover, they have rest disadvantages in nine games, as well as a four-in-five the week after Thanksgiving that takes them all the way to Toronto. It’s hardly the kind of itinerary that Luke Walton might have requested for his honeymoon.
New Orleans is another team with a noteworthy schedule. While the Pelicans have fewer games than the Lakers (an above-average 35), nine of them are on back-to-back, and a league-high 12 provide a rest disadvantage. On the bright side, only 15 are away.
The Cleveland Cavaliers and Washington Wizards occupy the opposite end of the spectrum. They each play an NBA-low 32 games, including an NBA-high 19 at home. But, whereas the Wizards have one fewer back-to-back (six), the Cavs have two more matchups in which they have a rest advantage (10). Perhaps the defending champions are well-positioned for a strong start.
To be sure, the dashboard can benefit from the addition of numerous other features that would facilitate more sophisticated analyses. It can, for example, incorporate the distance traveled by NBA teams and the relative quality of opponents. It can also aggregate all of these factors into a single number that measures strength of schedule. Visually, it can present different views for deeper dives into particular metrics, teams, or leaguewide trends.
For now, though, I hope that this simple tool helps us better prepare for the upcoming 2016-17 season.