I’m not much of a basketball fan…OK, I don’t care about it at all. Football and baseball are my sports. But I’m puzzled by the way the NBA schedules road trips. It seems like a team goes on the road and plays one game in one city, then flies to another for another single game, then hits the skies to fly to yet a third city, etc. Why in the world do they not schedule 2-3 games at a time in each city instead of spreading them all over the schedule? (As they do in baseball). The NBA season is long and hard, and it would seem to make sense that scheduling this way would mean less time spent on planes, less money spent on travel, and better rested players.
Alright, the NBA is divided into two conferences, and the conferences (Eastern and Western) are divided into two divisions each (Atlantic and Central, Pacific and Midwestern, respectively.) Each team plays each team in the other conference twice each- once at home, and once away. Then they play the teams in their conference four times each- two home/ two away. There are a few exceptions, I think, but that’s the general rule.
That means that at most, teams could only play each other twice on the same court. In cases where an Eastern Conf. team plays a Western Conf. team, that particular game is the only game they’ll play on that court all season. So really, it would be impossible to do it the way baseball does, because the biggest series you could play would be two games. Instead, they try to schedule it so that an east coast team travels across the west coast in big chunks to minimize the amount of travel involved, and vice versa. For example, starting on Feb. 1, the Lakers (and your namesake Stanislav Medvedenko, I might add) play the following games:
AT Toronto
AT Indiana
AT Cleveland
AT Philadelphia
AT Orlando
AT Miami
AT Houston
Portland (Home)
You can see how they start up in Canada and sort of work their way south into Florida, and then stop in Houston on the way back to L.A. Considering that the schedule makers have to work out schedules for 29 teams at the same time, it’s not such a bad way to handle it.
Baseball schedules are simpler for two reasons- first, there’s more games, so there’s more consolidation. Two, there are designated interleague play times in baseball- except during those times, teams are only playing teams from the same league, which means that there are effectively two 16-team schedules, instead of one big one. In the NBA, any team could be playing any other team on any given night.
Also, don’t forget that many NBA teams share stadiums with NHL Hockey teams. You have to actually plan your team’s schedule around the constraints and schedules of the other stadium tenants as well, and this involves extraordinary coordination between the various sports leagues. Sometimes, time is so tight that an NHL Hockey game will be played in the early afternoon time range, and then the ice will be covered in time for the evening’s NBA Basketball game.