Nylon Calculus: 2017-18 NBA calendar dashboard
Perhaps more than other schedules of the recent past, the 2017-18 NBA calendar draws considerable attention. It comes amid growing concern that, as ESPN’s Baxter Holmes and Tom Haberstroh put it, the league’s “injury problem is a scheduling one.” It arrives within a context of long-term trends showing that coaches have been increasingly resting their players earlier in the year. It represents the first schedule of the new collective bargaining agreement, which strives to address player rest and game competitiveness by extending the regular season from 170 to “approximately 177 days” and increasing the minimum number of player days off from 16 to 18. The NBA calendar is more than just a collection of game dates; it’s a high-stakes enterprise — a platform for Adam Silver’s priorities.
In many respects, the league has made notable (if incremental) progress. According to Brian Windhorst, it has eliminated dreadful periods in which teams play four games in five nights and 18 games in 30 days. It has reduced back-to-backs from 16.3 to 14.9 per team. It has cut down single-game road trips, particularly for those over 2,000 miles. Jeff Zillgitt reports that the owners expect to adopt additional player-resting rules in September, but even without these new policies, the 2017-18 calendar already marks a step forward for the NBA.
Of course, scheduling changes have varying effects on teams. Total back-to-backs, for example, range from 13 (Cleveland Cavaliers, Los Angeles Lakers, Miami Heat and New Orleans Pelicans) to 16 (Memphis Grizzlies, Sacramento Kings and Utah Jazz).
While the NBA schedule does not exist in a vacuum, and other considerations (like site venue and opponent rest, among numerous others) mitigate the impact of any one variable, this three-game gap in back-to-backs still contributes to different logistical conditions for teams. The more we can understand the unique journeys that franchises must navigate, perhaps the more insight we can gain into their playoff pursuits.
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To help us digest and contextualize the 1,230 regular-season games, I’ve updated my NBA calendar dashboard and posted it at presidual.shinyapps.io/nba-calendar. Like last year’s version, this tool facilitates a quick exploration of every team’s schedule. It provides basic information on game location (home or road contest, travel distance, time zone changes, etc.) and player rest (number of idle days between games, whether this figure is higher or lower relative to an opponent, back-to-backs, etc.). It also features new interactive maps that visualize road trips, numerous plots that enable team comparisons and various calendars that frame individual games within the broader season. As before, schedules can be filtered by team and date.
Let’s take a look at a couple of simple examples.
From Opening Night through Christmas Day, the Phoenix Suns are slated to play 35 games, the second-highest total behind the Boston Celtics’ 37. They have the most back-to-backs (9). However, their home-road split (18 vs. 17) is fairly balanced, and their 17,725 miles are below average.
In that same time period, the Toronto Raptors have just 31 games, including four back-to-backs, both of which are tied for the fewest in the league. But they’re on the road more than the average team (18 games) while logging 19,268 miles.
While the Suns and Raptors have different logistical issues to navigate, I’d caution against drawing broader conclusions beyond this observation, at least right now. Some variables might help us contextualize how teams proceed through the calendar, but they may not necessarily have a demonstrated link to game results. Most notably, as Nick Restifo has pointed out, “unlike altitude and rest, pre-game distance traveled doesn’t appear to be on the list of significantly predictive regular season attributes.” It’s certainly useful to have a sense of the types of road trips that teams experience. Such details, however, should be kept in perspective.
After all, when we’re dealing with something that can be mathematically compared to the “number of atoms in the universe,” perspective truly is crucial.
Next: Aaron Gordon’s future meets its limit in 2017-18
Technical Notes
The dashboard is best viewed at 1920 x 1080 resolution. Some sections (particularly the calendar heatmaps) take some time to display, but once they are initially loaded, they should operate just fine.
As mentioned previously, “distance traveled” is estimated by taking the coordinates of NBA cities and applying the Haversine formula. Teams tend to use “air miles” when reporting their road trips, so the results may vary slightly.