The NBA Will Make A Ton Of Changes To Its Schedule That Are Sure To Make Players Happy


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The issue of player rest and, by extension, overall game scheduling became a top-tier issue for the NBA during the 2016-2017 season. The league’s premier match-ups, displayed nationally on Saturday evenings, were foiled by rest on more than one occasion and even LeBron James weighed in by simply expressing that there wasn’t much the league could do about it.

However, the NBA is doing what they are able to do in making tweaks to the 2017-2018 schedule and Brian Windhorst of ESPN became aware of a league-wide memo that outlined some of the changes. While the league can’t eliminate a team’s ability to regulate the deployment of their own players, the NBA was focused on lessening back-to-backs and the general workload of teams across the association.

Part of the new schedule outline will allow teams to enter prime, nationally televised match-ups without a back-to-back on either side, and that is just the beginning. ESPN’s report indicates that there are no longer portions of the calendar in which teams are playing four games in five nights and teams will be asked to play five games over a seven-night period on only 40 total occasions across the league.

Beyond that, the memo reportedly indicates that traveling for one-game road trips will be decreased. The headliner could be seen as the overall decrease in back-to-backs for each team in the league. In short, teams will average only 14.9 back-to-back sets throughout the campaign, which is an overall lessening of 40 such sets when compared to the 2016-2017 season.

Of course, nothing is final until the league-wide schedule release but that should be coming in the (very) near future given that the timeline is shortened with the decision to move the beginning of the season to mid-October. At the end of the day, there are still real challenges with an 82-game season and scheduling is an extremely difficult task. These changes are unquestionably positive for the players, though, and that is a very good thing.

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