NBA 2012-2013 Schedule has been released on July 26, 2012.

• You can download NBA league or team schedules in excel format to build up your own analysis.
• Check out the rest days analysis including opponents.

New schedule brings "back-to-back-to-back" situation that creates new types of rest days. It seems crazy at first, but you'll get it when you go through below examples. More insane events from the condensed season: the new schedule features a 9-IN-12! (nine games in 12 days) stint for the Hawks; Cleveland has a franchise record 9 game home-stand; Toronto will play 19-IN-31 in January, etc. You can extend those by downloading NBA schedule in Excel and build your own analysis.

Take X, as the day with a game played and take O, as the off day.
NO REST:
5IN6-B2B2B: 5th game in 6 days w/ playing on the last 3 consecutive nights. X+X+O+[X+X+X]
5IN6 : 5th game in 6 days w/ playing on the last 2 consecutive nights. X+X+X+O+[X+X]
4IN5-B2B2B: 4th game in 5 days w/ playing on the last 3 consecutive nights. X+O+[X+X+X]
4IN5-B2B : 4th game in 5 days w/ playing on the last 2 consecutive nights. X+X+O+[X+X]
4IN5 : 4th game in 5 days w/o playing on the last night. X+X+X+O+X
3IN4-B2B2B: 3rd game in 4 days w/ playing on the last 3 consecutive nights. O+[X+X+X]
B2B2B: Rested at least 2 days before playing on the last 3 consecutive nights. O+O+[X+X+X]
3IN4-B2B : 3rd game in 4 days w/ playing on the last 2 consecutive nights. X+O+[X+X]
B2B : 2nd game in 2 days w/ playing on the last 2 consecutive nights. [X+X]
AT LEAST 1 DAY REST:
3IN4 : 3rd game in 4 days and 1 day rest (yesterday). X+X+O+X
1 :1 day rest (yesterday) and a playing a game. O+X
2 : 2 days rest and a playing a game. O+O+X
3+: 3 or more days rest and playing a game: O+O+O+X

The NBA lockout has reached a point at which it has begun to negatively impact everyone from fans to players, and everyone in between. This is not just a problem that keeps the players off of the court. It also keeps literally thousands of people – trainers, stadium officials, management, coaches, etc., out of business. In fact, it even affects the tv networks. For example, without the Warriors playing basketball, direct TV San Francisco probably won’t bring in the same revenue, the same being true for local networks all over the country. If the NBA doesn’t resolve its issues soon, these problems will seemingly only spread to more people. Unfortunately, however, things aren’t looking good at the moment.

NBA Commissioner David Stern has already cancelled a batch of games, so we have already hit the point at which no games will be played before December 1st. There are rumors, however, that the league has built up a contingency plan that will still allow for a full, 82-game season despite this setback. If the lockout endures long enough to postpone more games, though, then the season – if, indeed, there is one – will officially have to be shortened to less than its full length. And, if this past weekend’s labor negotiations ended as bleakly as many seem to think they did, it would seem that this unfortunate situation is very likely.

The final hurdle that is keeping the NBA Players’ Association and the league from finalizing a new deal is BRI (Basketball Related Income), which essentially decides how league revenue will be split up between the owners and the players. The owners have been driving a hard line toward a 50/50 split, which would see the players giving up 7% from the last collective bargaining agreement. Now, however, David Stern has offered the players 51%, and has given them until this coming Wednesday the 9th to accept the offer – or else that number will drop dramatically.

While a 51/49 split would allow the players to save some measure of pride in not dropping all the way to 50/50, NBPA leader Derek Fisher has indicated that this offer is not acceptable to the Players’ Association. In fact, there are now strong rumors that many of the league’s most prominent players are pushing to decertify the union, which would essentially allow the players to sue the league, and would also, in effect, start the negotiating process over. Ultimately, it boils down to this: if the players can work out a deal by Wednesday, then the season may actually still be saved in its entirety. However, if not, we may lose an entire season – and everyone from players, to stadium concession workers, and everyone in the NBA business may lose a long year. At the end, the NBA will also lose some portion of its global reputation.

UPDATE (12/06) | SCHEDULE HAS BEEN RELEASED
The shortened schedule is finally up. You can download the NBA schedule with each of the 30 team schedules in excel or play with the rest days breakdown.

UPDATE (12/01) | SCHEDULE OUT TUESDAY
2011-2012 regular season schedule should finally be available by Tuesday night at 7 p.m. according to Associated Press. NBA will host a schedule release TV program on Dec 6th.
Once it's been out, you can download the NBA 2011-12 schedule in excel format or take a look at team-by-team analysis by the types of rest-days including "back-to-back-to-back" games.

UPDATE (11/29) | 2 MORE CHRISTMAS DAY GAMES
According to New York Times, NBA will open the 2011-12 season on Christmas with a five-game setup with one on TNT, two on ABC and two on ESPN. Earlier, David Stern said that, there will be triple header during the end-of-the-lockout press conference.

UPDATE (11/27) | SCHEDULE DETAILS OF 66 GAME SCHEDULE
*: The last day of 2011-12 NBA regular season will be April 26, 2012.
*: Teams to play "at least one" and "maximum three" "back-to-back-to-back" sets in case games start on Christmas Day.
*: Teams will play 48 conference and 18 nonconference games. This means not every NBA city will be visited.
*: This comes as a surprise for me: Due to the squeezed schedule, back-to-backs games might be played during the second round of the playoffs.

UPDATE (11/25) | TENTATIVE AGREEMENT
*: NBA 2011-2012 regular season is supposed to start with 3 games on Christmas Day, that were already on the schedule.
*: The rest of the 66 game schedule will be rescheduled and released in the coming days. Check back in later to keep updated!

UPDATE (07/19) | FIRST RELEASE OF 82 GAME SCHEDULE
Assuming that the league will start on November 1, 2011, our annual schedule analysis is up. Hopefully this lockout thing comes to an end!
MIL, IND, HOU, NYK, MIN, LAC playing most back-to-backs (22 times). Fewest back-to-backs: SAC, PHO (16)
*: 20 of 22 games are on the road for New York Knicks. Lakers playing all 18 back to backs games on the road. Fewest back to backs on the road: MIL (8), ATL (9), DET (10)
*: Most opponent B2Bs: Atlanta (28), Fewest opponent B2Bs: MIA (9)
*: Most 4 games in 5 days: DEN, LAC, MIN, CHI, IND (4 times). Fewest 4IN5s: DET, NJN, PHO, HOU, BOS, LAL, POR will play only 1 game.
*: LAC, MIL, UTA (9) are tied for playing with 3 or more days rest. DET, TOR, MEM have 4 games with 3+ days.
*: Houston's opponents will play 12 games with having more than 3 or more days rest. League low, Washington's oppositions only play 1 game in this situation.
Follow NBAstuffer on Twitter for more interesting notes!

The shortened schedule will be released on Tuesday (Dec.,6th) around 7 p.m. Check out updates about the schedule. As usual, you can also download NBA schedule in excel format.

Good news is NBA is getting 2011-12 schedule ready on July 19, 2011. Despite the fact that lockout continues, NBA gives away us some of our toys to play with! The rest days analysis of the "draft" schedule will be ready here at NBAstuffer once the NBA schedule has been released.

UPDATE: The schedule has been released today (7/19). The downloadable files from the 2011-12 regular season will be available once the lockout ends and the schedule gets cleared.

I'm often asked about how to make accurate predictions and what tools I used to employ in the past. I've observed that this subject is not well understood in the NBA community, so I'll try to provide more insight in this post.

Majority of people picked the Lakers against Dallas, right? Simulations, statistics and gut could tell us the the Lakers was the better team, as all players were healthy and they've also been supposed to have the motivation of pursuing the three-peat etc. They ended up getting swept by Dallas and arguably the best coach in NBA history admitted after the series that despite the way how it ended, he was happy to see things has come to an end.

Many individuals and organizations has a shot at predictive modeling. The art of predicting anything brings numerous techniques to the table. Simulations, the well known way of predicting, can reveal hidden patterns or potential successes / failures about any team or a individual player. However, trades and injuries are the factors that ruins simulations and have a big impact on the prediction accuracy.

Like what simulations do, machine learning techniques can help hidden data trends come to surface. Aside from statistical prediction, machine learning techniques are another method of providing sport-related predictions. Neural Networks are considered to be one of the strongest machine learning systems in sports prediction. Within neural networks, data sets are learned by the system and hidden trends in the data can be unveiled.
Neural Networks can be used as a decision support system and as a fantasy league tool in following ways; * Stat Mining: Location of common characteristics in large amounts of data,
* Odds Setting: Calculation of winning probabilities in a sports game,
* Momentum Mentality: Forecasting trends based on previous data,
* Similar Players: Grouping potential assets / talents based on similarities.
Other machine learning techniques include genetic algorithm, the decision tree algorithm and a regression-based variant of the Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier, called Support Vector Regression (SVR).

The NBA has been experimental for various machine learners so far. Despite employing different algorithms, they all had one common similarity, beating the NBA odds for a competitive or financial advantage. For example, according to the hot-hand theory in basketball", researchers found that making a shot would not increase the chance of making another shot. The academical study based on real data showed that, the success of a shot was independent of previous shots. What's more, people frequently try to find out a patterns that never exists or even happened in the history. Streaks are possible and can be observed frequently, but the future games must be evaluated independently from the result of previous games. This is due to the nature of being normally distributed. Never forget that many games come down to critical free throws the players even who have best shooting mechanisms might miss free throws in the last second. This situation triggers other game result oriented events and has an impact game winning, spreads, or game totals. At this point, psychology science would better take things over. Simulation and predictive techniques are the tools to identify weaknesses, if correctly used best action for fixing errors. These techniques begin to become arsenals to isolate instances of these human factors.

The ability to apply statistics and rigorous mathematical models to provide instantaneous results is still still in the very early ages, observing what they will develop into in the near future would be interesting.

This blog post is not written much from an advanced stats viewpoint. I just wanted to share my thoughts, observations and predictions for the rest of the Playoffs 2011.

Let's list the weakest links team-by-team first.

EASTERN CONFERENCE

• Chicago: Keith Bogans has been playing 38.5% of minutes. In contrary to Tom Thibodeau, I don't think he even is an average defender.
• Miami: Guarding the opposition point guards. Whoever plays at #1, I've not been satisfied.
• Boston: Jeff the "out of post season rotation" Green. Other than that, C's are the team designed for the Playoffs. OKC's best move was getting rid of him. Plus addition of Perkins to the mix increased interior strength.
• Orlando: How about having Arenas and his "zero" minutes in game 3.
• Atlanta: Inconsistency. We would never know if they might advance even after leading 3-1 in the series. One might benefit highly from NBA betting off of this Hawks situation.
• New York: Melodrama. Lack of team play. The Knicks community would like to believe the fact that by acquiring Carmelo they invested in future, not this year's playoffs success. Not to mention higher ticket prices as a short term benefit.
• Philadelphia: Preseason targets. Making playoffs should not be the only target.
• Indiana: Lack of experience in close games. Maybe the players don't believe they deserve the Playoffs?

WESTERN CONFERENCE

• San Antonio: PF position. Tim Duncan only plays with intelligence and Matt Bonner has nothing to do with playing some "D". The next opponent should be OKC.
• Los Angeles: All bench players.
• Dallas: Predictability. The Mavericks are too consistent. Portland's advanced stats department are happy to get what they predicted.
• Oklahoma City: Coaching. I don't like the way the coach wants his team to play at the crunch time. For the opponents, OKC is very predictable to defend in the last 2 minutes.
• Denver: Strategic t(a)hinking? I can't believe why they didn't want Dallas instead of OKC. Maybe there lies a overdose confidence of being the best team after all-star game?
• Portland: Backcourt. Despite having a solid frontcourt, they need some creativity in offensive sets. That's not something you can do at "Miller time".
• New Orleans: Lack of winner mentalism. Lakers in five, no doubt.
• Memhpis: Management. They let one the valuable pieces of team to relax just after to first franchise playoff victory.