NBA.com sat down with league executives to break down some of the toughest calls the NBA office makes each year, including how the league builds its 82-game schedule for 30 teams.
Evan Wasch, the NBA's Executive Vice President of Basketball Strategy and Growth, walked through just how complex that job really is. There are more possible combinations for placing 1,230 games across roughly 180 nights than there are atoms in the universe, a fact Wasch says checks out mathematically.
The league's task is finding the one schedule that best balances player health, travel, back-to-backs, network windows and team business needs.
The article explains how the NBA partners with Fastbreak AI and uses constraint-based optimization to get there, writing constraints for everything the league wants to see or avoid in a schedule, then weighting each one so the system knows what matters most. The league writes over 3,000 constraints most years, building on the prior season's model rather than starting over each time.
"The way we do it is we partner with a software company called Fastbreak, and it's called constraint-based optimization, where you write a constraint for all of the things that you either want to see in the schedule or you want to avoid," Wasch said.
From there, the piece walks through how the national television schedule becomes the schedule's first building block, and why deciding which teams land in marquee windows like Christmas Day and opening week is one of the league's best problems to have.
Read the full NBA.com article by Jeff Zillgitt to see how the NBA turns a math problem bigger than the universe into a season.
About Fastbreak AI
Fastbreak AI delivers AI-powered scheduling and sports operations software for professional leagues, clubs, collegiate conferences, and international federations. Headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina, Fastbreak AI supports organizations worldwide, including the NBA, MLS, NHL and Serie A and collegiate conferences like the SEC, with technology that improves scheduling, event management, and performance at every level of sport. Learn more at www.fastbreak.ai.
