Stan Van Gundy is getting tired of playing so many back-to-backs
Scheduling imbalance has been a hot-button NBA issue ever since lottery-bound Western Conference teams began regularly winning more games than the East’s lower playoff seeds more than a decade ago, and the disparity between the two conferences may have reached an all-time high this season.
While NBA commissioner Adam Silver has pledged “to make a change” to the league’s playoff format, no such adjustment is expected until at least 2016-17, but there is another scheduling quirk that could be addressed even sooner: The discrepancy between the number of back-to-back games each team faces.
ESPN.com’s Marc Stein first raised the issue earlier this month, when he noted how the Dallas Mavericks had benefited from a day’s rest before facing an opponent that had played the night before on a season-high 18 occasions this season — compared to just three such instances for the Atlanta Hawks.
A few days later, Pistons.com’s Keith Langlois followed with a look at Detroit’s league-leading 22 back-to-back sets this season — a jarring number when considering the NBA plays an 82-game schedule. Only the Cleveland Cavaliers had a greater discrepancy between the number of back-to-backs they played (20) and the number of times they faced an opponent coming off a back-to-back (11), per NBAstuffer.com.
In the piece, Pistons coach and team president Stan Van Gundy urged the league to rethink the matter.
“It’s something the league needs to address, but I’ve got no control over it,” Stan Van Gundy said last week. “As a coach, you play ’em, but that’s a major schedule imbalance.”
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“I think the Board of Governors is who needs to bring that up and we’ll address that in the off-season,” Van Gundy said. “But there should be an equity in scheduling. Scheduling should not be to anyone’s advantage or disadvantage.”
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“To me, what we’re doing on back to backs, where we’ve got, between the teams that play the most and the teams that play the least, a six- or seven-game disparity, we would never tolerate that in terms of home or away. If you looked at the schedule and you said, they’ve got 45 home games and hey, they’ve only got 37 (road games), everybody would go crazy. But on the back to backs, we don’t say anything.
“I think that is something to be addressed. The more equitable you make the schedule for everybody, the better off it is. I don’t think one team should be playing six more back to backs than somebody else, but that’s me.”
In a perfect world, each team would play the same number of back-to-backs while also facing the same number of opponents playing on the second night of a back-to-back. It doesn’t seem right that the Cavaliers will play nine more games on the second night of a back-to-back than their opponents this season, while the Heat will play nine fewer back-to-backs than their foes in 2014-15.
But scheduling 82 games for 30 teams in six divisions across two conferences is far from an exact science. There are any number of untold issues involved with creating the NBA schedule — like Disney on Ice’s annual trip to TD Garden that sends the Celtics on a West Coast trip every year — and the travel miles each team logs are another important mitigating factor the schedule-makers must consider.
According to NBAsavant.com, only three teams will travel fewer miles this season than the Pistons, whose location allows for shorter flights to most other NBA cities. Meanwhile, the Portland Trail Blazers will log 21,466 more miles than Detroit this season while playing only three fewer back-to-backs. Van Gundy also isn’t complaining about facing the most teams playing their fourth game in five nights or the fact they have three or more days of rest on seven occasions in 2014-15 (second only to Houston’s 9).
So, while the NBA should absolutely look into any serious discrepancy in the number of back-to-backs each team faces, scheduling imbalance is far more complicated than just one issue. Whichever way they slice it, somebody will complain for one reason or another, especially if one can use the schedule to find a way to explain why the Pistons lost to the Philadelphia 76ers on two occasions this season.
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Ben Rohrbach is a contributor for Ball Don’t Lie and Shutdown Corner on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter! Follow @brohrbach
