Matt Winick, who has been the architect of the NBA schedule for more than 20 seasons, is the NBA's vice president of scheduling and game operations. Winick starts it in February. 6 months later, in first week of August, the final schedule is completed. His interview with ESPN, unveils how he responds to complaints about strength of schedule and common questions on building the NBA schedule.

According to Matt Winick, the NBA sets the league schedule to accomplish both competitive balance and a reduction of costs. The goal of the NBA schedule, as it is constructed, is to be efficient from a competitive standpoint with an indirect consideration of travel costs.

Matt Winick has a complicated system that assigns a point value to each date or series of dates a team makes available. The point system rewards a team for making several consecutive dates available instead of insisting on a particular date. Each time team must amass at least 50 points. Generally, teams play 3.5 games in a week and those 82 games take roughly 165 days through the end of regular season.

Factors that have an impact on setting NBA schedule can be summarized as follows:

1. NBA SCHEDULING FORMULA

Each team have to play:

• 4 games against the other 4 division opponents, [4x4=16 games]
• 4 games against 6 (out-of-division) conference opponents, [4x6=24 games]
• 3 games against the remaining 4 conference teams, [3x4=12 games]
• 2 games against teams in the opposing conference. [2x15=30 games]

A five year rotation determines which out-of-division conference teams are played only 3 times.

2. COURT AVAILABILITY

All teams, about a month before the end of the preceding regular season, have to submit to the NBA office a list of:

• at least 50 dates on which their home court will be available,
• 4 Mondays
• 4 Thursdays (to help TNT plan its telecasts).

3. OFFICIAL BREAKS (on which no games are played)

• Christmas eve,
• The all-star game,
• NCAA championship game,

4. CONFLICTS

The conflicts such as NHL games on the same court have to be resolved.

5. BROADCASTERS

Games can be moved to satisfy the NBA's TV partners (ABC, ESPN and TNT). Game times can be tweaked.