Schedule

From the archive. The table above is the old site’s own fixture list, kept as it was filed — the dates, the opponents and the tip-off times are the ones that were published at the time, and they have not been touched. It is a historical document rather than a schedule to plan around. What follows is the part that does not go out of date: how a season is laid out, and why a fixture list looks the way it does.

The shape of a season

A regular season is built out of repeated blocks rather than drawn up game by game. Clubs in the same division meet more often than clubs in the same conference, and clubs in the same conference meet more often than clubs in the other one. That is why the same three or four opponents keep reappearing in a single month while others turn up twice all year, and why a list read straight down looks lopsided until you know what generated it.

Why the road trips cluster

Nobody schedules one game at a time on the other side of the country. Travel is the constraint the whole calendar bends around, so western games arrive in runs of four, five or six, and a home stand of similar length usually follows. The arena itself adds a second constraint: it is booked for concerts and for other tenants, and a basketball fixture cannot be put in a slot the building has already sold. A long trip in the middle of a season often means nothing more than that.

Back-to-backs

Games on consecutive nights are the single most useful thing to spot in a fixture list. They shape who plays, who rests and how the second game is approached, and they are the reason two fixtures against the same opponent a fortnight apart can look nothing alike. Reading a list for the gaps between dates tells you more about the season than reading it for the opponents.

What the times mean

Tip-off times are not fixed by the clock. Weekday home games sit in the early evening, weekend games move earlier, and anything picked up for national broadcast moves to suit the broadcast rather than the building. A time published months ahead is provisional by nature, which is the other reason the table above is best read as a record.

For how the calendar interacts with contracts, rest and the rest of the rulebook, the explainers are on the explainers desk, and the league-wide coverage is on the NBA desk.