Rescheduling the NBA regular season via Integer Programming

GARCÍA ARAMOUNI, NICOLÁS; MIRANDA BRONT, JUAN JOSÉ

Reading

Conferencia; MathSport International 9 Conference; 2022

University of Reading / EURO

The COVID-19 pandemic generated disruptions across multiple sectors, in particular in the sports industry as many leagues had to re-adapt their competitions as a consequence of lock-downs, travel restrictions and other implemented safety measures. Even when activities started to resume, match suspensions continued throughout the different leagues. Dealing effectively with these unexpected events is extremely relevant regarding both sports and economic aspects of the competitions. In this paper, we propose a framework that builds upon Integer Programming models to systematically reschedule suspended games and generate a contingency fixture that accounts for relevant operational constraints. Using the 2020-21 NBA season as a benchmark, we compare different scheduling approaches under two different objective functions. Computational results show that the approach produces good quality schedules and that the framework has potential to be applied in practice.