The NBA’s Scheduling Czar Takes Us Inside How An NBA Season Schedule Comes Together

There are few things in NBA basketball more anticipated, maligned, scoffed at, and thought of by fans as a league-sanctioned conspiracy against their team as the regular season schedule. No one calendar should have all this power, and yet we picture evil genius masterminds hunkered down at NBA HQ mining our every fear and worry, even taking into account our social schedules somehow, to return to us a range of dates we will scrutinize until the season starts in October.

So, who are these masterminds? Well they aren’t evil, for one, just a dozen or so incredibly organized people across multiple departments that start their work for the next NBA season as the current season you are about to enjoy is getting underway. Think of them like friendly seers looking out for your future interests, or like basketball’s Farmers’ Almanac, but with more sophisticated software. However you think of them, please stop thinking they are out to get you.

Dime had the chance to chat with one of these scheduling czars — Gene Li, the NBA’s Senior Director, National Broadcast Lead — ahead of Wednesday’s 2022-23 season release.

When do you start putting together the schedule and how long does this process actually take?

So the process usually starts in the fall when we start collecting arena dates from teams. But I would say the actual scheduling of putting games on the board, that we don’t really start doing until early July. Basically after a Champion’s been crowned, after the NBA Draft, and basically after the start of free agency. So we have a better idea of what the teams will look like in the fall.

So you’re starting to put the schedule together for the next season, in the fall of the current season?

That’s right. So pretty much when the season starts, we’ll start planning for the following season.

Oh wow. Do you get any downtime?

We also do the WNBA schedule, the G League schedule as well, so there’s not really much downtime.

How do you take into consideration other events at venues, like concerts, or hockey games, or one-off things like circuses? Do you work closely with venues across all the NBA franchise cities to coordinate that information?

Of course. So my colleague, Tom Carelli, he’s our main lead with the teams and the arenas. Basically he gets all that information for our team, from all 29 of our arenas. Basically, when the NHL plans to play, when we have concert holds, the longer blocks like a Disney On Ice. We’re aware of all of those things and that’s honestly one of our bigger challenges when creating the schedule. If we were able to have every single available day in all the arenas, then the schedule would probably be great just because we would have more options for where we can schedule games. So we try our best to navigate around those arena conflicts and still create a schedule that works for everyone.

Teams will be traveling 50,000 fewer miles this season than last year and there are 88 no-travel instances for teams as well. How do you approach mitigating as much cross-country, or long road trip travel as possible for teams?

Basic travel efficiency — averages and mileages — is one of our top priorities. Those no-travel instances, especially toward back-to-backs, are something that we really focus on. Those teams that we have, you’re going to the same market for two games, whether that’s against a team, like the Lakers and Clippers, or Nets and Knicks, those really do help with reducing stress and mileage. In the past we actually had reservations about doing those. We weren’t sure how the teams would feel, both competitively and having the same opponent visit your market for two nights, but with these past two seasons and the small sample size, we’ve seen that there really isn’t a downside from a competitive standpoint. So we’ll keep monitoring that for the seasons to come, but we’re glad it’s working out, that the teams like it and that it’s had that positive impact on travel.

Is that something you and your team focus on, these adjustments season over season? Obviously travel is a pretty huge one, but maybe smaller adjustments to streamline or tweak things?

Yes, we’re always trying to improve things for the following season, and we always get feedback from teams, from our internal league stakeholders, even from our national broadcast partners. We always like to get feedback during the season, and then we try to implement those smaller things for future schedules.

So I’ve heard of the acronym, FTE: Fresh, Tired, Even. Does that factor into scheduling?

FTE is our Fresh, Tired, Even score. So that’s basically where it compares whether you’re on the second night of a back-to-back compared to your opponent. So if you’re both not on the second night of a back-to-back, or if you’re both on the second night of a back-to-back, then you’re even. If you are not on the second night of a back-to-back but your opponent is, then you’re fresh and they’re tired. We do take this into consideration. We basically want to make sure that no team, for the entire 82 game schedule, has too many fresh games compared to tired games, or vice versa. From a competitive standpoint, we don’t want one team to have too many of one or the other. So similar to everything else, we can’t get all things to be equal. But we basically try to have a narrow range.

This might be a really broad question. How do you even break down starting to schedule this all within your team? Is it like, “I’m going to take this division,” “I’ll do these teams from the Eastern Conference”?

In creating the schedule, the first games we’ll schedule are the 160 or so national TV games across ABC, ESPN, and TNT. I’m primarily responsible for that schedule. Obviously because our national TV schedule is a huge priority not only for us, but for our team and broadcast partners, we do those first. We make sure we can hit our broadcast windows with our most marquee and appealing matchups. After we finalize those games, then our basketball strategy team will use our optimizer software to build the rest of the full, 1,230 game schedule on top of the national TV games.

Got it. I bet the software makes it a lot easier than the wild way I just made up in my head.

I cannot imagine if there was one guy doing it by hand for all 1,230. I just … I just can’t imagine that.

What would you say to fans who swear the NBA schedule has something personal against their team every season?

[chuckles] I think, honestly, it’s very rewarding to know that our fans care so much. I think we’re the league that probably has the most scrutinized schedule, obviously our teams, our players, our fans, media, everyone’s very focused on the schedule. That’s rewarding to know our work is something everyone cares about. I think because there’s so much to the schedule, there’s 82 games, there’s only a limited number of broadcast windows, everyone can feel slighted in some way when you look at parts of the schedule. So that’s natural to us. Our mantra, at the league office, is we can’t please everyone, but we hope to displease everyone the same.

There’s that saying that if you try and make everybody happy, nobody’s happy. Would you say that’s true of undergoing something like the NBA schedule?

Yes. Basically, there just really isn’t a way to please everyone because there’s probably things that have competing interests and competing desires. We just want to make sure that we are fair and we’re equitable, both across the league and teams, in terms of the game schedule and national broadcast schedule. We hope to do things in a fair way that’s transparent, and if teams are equally not happy with us, then we probably did a good job.

How and when do you factor in national games?

That’s really why we have to wait until after the start of free agency. Usually the big movement happens at the start of free agency, and obviously knowing who’s the Champion, that’s important. They have to play on opening night, for the ring ceremony and that kind of stuff, they should probably play at home on Christmas and so forth. But throughout, I would say starting in the playoffs all the way through the start of free agency and us building out a schedule, we’re constantly having very collaborative discussions with our broadcast partners. So by the time we start scheduling the games, we’re aligned with our partners in terms of the teams they want to feature, matchups they want to feature, when and where they want to feature these teams and matchups. We have a really good idea by the time free agency starts of what we want to do.

How many people have to sign off on the schedule and are there a lot of edits?

I’ll speak to national TV and the game schedule. The overall scheduling process is very collaborative internally as well. We have stakeholders from all different departments in the league office. Everyone will weigh in. I take everyone’s feedback both internally, as well as broadcast partners. We’ll send ESPN, TNT the first draft, they’ll have some comments, and we’ll release the final broadcast schedule. For the overall game schedule, we’ll send teams a first draft of their schedule, and then teams will have about 24 to 48 hours for their feedback, and we’ll incorporate their feedback before the final schedule release.

So a lot of feedback.

A lot, a lot, a lot of feedback. Absolutely.

There are a couple new features in the schedule this year. There will be no games on Election Day, and there’s going to be an NBA Rivals Week. How do new features like this change the work your team does?

We just consider it basically like a new wrinkle that we should consider. Definitely very exciting for us to have these new tentpoles. We have various work streams within the league office, we’re always contemplating new tentpoles. Bringing awareness, for example, to civic engagement like Election Day, or to get fans’ attention, like Rivals Week. These things are always being discussed in the “lab” at the league office.

I have to say this level of competence and organization is very impressive and intimidating to me — what kind of wizardry does this amount of work take? Can you speak a little on what it is about this work that you love?

Just having the passion for the NBA — watching the games, following the teams, following the players. That passion for the league is what really drives us. And then, because our overall scheduling team, is the widest within the league office. Everyone has their skillsets that they can then implement into scheduling process. So people that have technical skills, or skills related to broadcast or to basketball and so forth. So we’re just able to incorporate everyone’s skillsets in a way that’s complimentary to create the overall schedule.

Are there any past schedules that stick out in your mind, that you look back on and think, oh we really nailed that one?

Yes, so we really caught lightning in a bottle in the 2017-18 season. We had already released the schedule in mid-August the summer of 2017, and then after we released the schedule, Kyrie Irving was traded from Cleveland to Boston. So on opening night, we had Boston at Cleveland already, we got lucky there. And then Carmelo Anthony was traded from the Knicks to OKC, and we had Knicks-OKC on opening Thursday on TNT. So we got really lucky that year, with our opening and with the big player trades that happened after we had finalized the schedule.

So happy accidents.

[laughs] Right, exactly.

And finally, do you ever get to sit back — I think of the Christmas Day games — and enjoy your handiwork?

Oh yeah. I try to watch as many of our national TV games as possible. Especially for the tentpoles, and the playoffs honestly, too. I’m always watching and thinking, you know, when the games are close and exciting, then we feel good for them, but when they’re blowouts we think, oof, that’s a tough one. Now obviously our scheduling games doesn’t impact what goes on on the court at all, but it’s definitely rewarding to get to watch those games that we had scheduled.