Every summer the NBA releases its schedule for the upcoming season. It’s the endgame, after the League and its computers have gone through billions of iterations as part of a now fine-tuned operation run by an entire team of planning geeks. The NBA preseason schedule? Well, that’s another story.

At a time when the league has professionalized nearly every aspect of its business and centralized too much control for at least one particular owner, preseason remains one of the last bastions of freedom. Teams make their own schedules, choose their own opponents and have their own reasons for doing so.

The entire process is an alchemy of personal relationships, geography and of course trade. Every franchise has its quirks when filling out their schedules, sometimes years in advance. It’s more reminiscent of college football or basketball than professional sports.

Preseason rules

There are only a few rules for the preseason. They don’t even play games if they don’t want to. The NBA does not require a minimum number of games, only that teams cannot play more than six per year. The rest is up to the teams themselves.

“You have to encourage them to horse trade and help each other,” said a team manager who oversees scheduling for his franchise.

When it comes to scheduling, geography matters. The same applies to everyone’s satisfaction. The business side of the franchise tries to make enough money in the preseason, but the basketball team needs to use these games to prepare for the games that really matter – the regular season. The needs of the property should not be ignored either.

The whole thing is somewhere between a swap meet and a game of Battleship. Each franchise has a point of contact – some have several – and tries to close deals and find dates that work for both parties.

Teams typically look for home-and-home contracts; this is beneficial for both sides. Each team receives a guaranteed home game in the preseason, although not always in the same year. Hiccups may occur. Agreements may state that a game will be played at the team’s home arena or at a mutually agreed upon venue, giving a franchise leeway to play at its G League arena or another location only if the visiting team agrees agrees.

Can someone please explain to me why we are committing to a ✈️ and going to a preseason game in Milwaukee!?!?

—Lebron James (@KingJames) October 9, 2024

The Los Angeles Lakers will play six preseason games in five different arenas this season, in part due to renovations to Crypto.com Arena, and host a “home game” in Las Vegas for the second straight year. The LA Clippers will play five games in four cities. The Minnesota Timberwolves host the Philadelphia 76ers in Des Moines, Iowa.

“Opponents are more willing to come if there is a return, so it becomes a bit of a dance trying to find an opponent that has more away games than home games or has a vacancy in their schedule,” said John Beaven, chief revenue officer the Warriors. “That’s where the fun comes in.”

Sometimes home-and-home projects aren’t completed until the two franchises can agree on a workable date and location, but they bring some assurances into the process. The Orlando Magic will host the 76ers this month, but that was agreed to several years ago before Jamahl Mosley was hired as head coach, Magic chief operating officer Alex Martins said.

The Magic used to play eight games each preseason — eight was the maximum allowed before the 2017 collective bargaining agreement — because the business side drove scheduling, Martins said. But that has changed in recent years as revenue has increased everywhere else and Orlando has become less reliant on its goals from preseason games.

This allowed the team to focus more on the needs of its basketball operations. The schedule has been reduced to four games in recent years because Mosley and Jeff Weltman, the director of basketball operations, want a certain preseason rhythm. They prefer the Magic to start with a week of training camp, then play two road games and then come home and prepare for the regular season with their final two preseason games. The business ops team wants to play these games later in the week because those days attract more fans – this year the two home games are on consecutive Friday nights.

Location is important

The Magic are trying to stay in the Southeast and Texas in October, so they will begin the preseason with trips to New Orleans and San Antonio. When the Golden State Warriors look around the league for potential prep opponents, they start with teams from Los Angeles and Sacramento. The closer the better, not least because it makes traveling cheaper.

Some arenas, such as those that are home to multiple professional franchises and are popular concert venues, are more difficult to book. Some cities are not prime travel destinations.

Serendipity occasionally handles planning for teams. The Warriors’ veterans had asked for training camp to be held in Hawaii in previous years, but the team was unable to make it happen until this season. It can be difficult to get an opponent to travel to the island, but the Warriors didn’t want to set up camp there unless they could also play a game there. Luckily, the Clippers are also in Hawaii this year, for the fifth time since 2017.

“It fell into place pretty elegantly,” Beaven said.

Each team’s chief planner brings with him his own connections to other franchises in the NBA. The Detroit Pistons open their preseason by hosting the Milwaukee Bucks. Dan Lefton, the Pistons’ chief revenue officer, has worked with some of the Bucks’ top executives; An agreement to play each other was reached in less than 72 hours, he said.

Two days later, the Pistons host the Phoenix Suns at the Michigan State campus – a homecoming for Phoenix Suns owner Mat Ishbia. United Wholesale Mortgage, Ishbia’s company, is based in Michigan and was the Pistons’ jersey patch partner until this season. Although it has been replaced on the jerseys, UWM is still doing business with the Pistons. As a result of that relationship, UWM and Ishbia wanted to show his (relatively) new team its home game. The suns will also return; The teams have reached an agreement to play preseason games in Detroit in 2026 and 2027.

The Pistons will also play in Phoenix in a few weeks. Reciprocity is key to preseason planning. They will travel west for a game on October 11th and then make a trip to San Francisco on October 13th for a more local preseason game for the franchise’s ownership group – Tom Gores and his company Platinum Equity. are based in Los Angeles – creating an early bonding exercise for the Pistons’ roster.

“A lot of it is relationship-oriented,” Lefton said. “It’s similar to college athletics and coaches moving around and certain rivalries, yeah, I think there’s a lot that goes into that.”

There are also buying games in which one team has to fill a spot and another team – sometimes an international opponent – pays for it. According to league sources, the price range for signing another NBA team is around $75,000 to $200,000. When Shaquille O’Neal played for the Magic, Orlando was a popular preseason opponent and regularly benefited from buy games. The Magic haven’t been involved in a decade, Martins said.

International presence

Occasionally a team will have to pay an opposing team to step in if their original plan fails. The NBA is trying to help by sending a league-wide email to inform other franchises of the need, but teams may have to seek outside help.

The New Zealand Breakers came late into the 76ers’ schedule. Matt Walsh, owner and managing partner of the Breakers, received a call about eight weeks ago asking if the team would add another game to its U.S. tour. The Breakers already took a break from their NBL schedule to play the Utah Jazz and Oklahoma City Thunder. Walsh typically begins contacting NBA teams a year in advance to gauge their interest, but this time he received what is considered a last-minute request.

The Sixers wanted it at the top of their October schedule. The Breakers had already played in Utah on October 4th and Tulsa on October 10th, but Walsh agreed. He views these trips as rapid-fire efforts to drum up interest in his team and help recruit and acquire players like Karim Lopez, a potential 2026 first-round pick.

“You know when they say, ‘Oh, Notre Dame paid North Dakota State a million dollars to kick their ass?'” Walsh said. “I would love it if one day they wrote, ‘The Sixers or Jazz paid the Breakers to beat them.’

A preseason game with an international team — the Breakers are one of two international teams scheduled to play an NBA team this year — is one of the few situations where the NBA must be involved in the process. After the Breakers and Sixers agreed to a date, it took more than a month for the contracts to be finalized. The NBA, Walsh said, must agree to share the game’s broadcast in Australia. The Breakers had previous agreements in place, but these were revoked because they were unable to obtain local broadcast rights in their homeland; Last season, he said, a match with the Cavaliers fell through because they couldn’t find a date or a way to share the broadcast.

Aside from collecting and reviewing games for approval, the NBA mostly stays out of the way. This is how teams prefer it.

“Everyone is kind of surprised that the league hasn’t adopted this,” the team manager said. “Because they took over everything else.”

The NBA centralized preseason schedules in 2020, ahead of its first full season during the COVID-19 pandemic, as it did in 2011 after the lockout, but relinquished control the next year. The teams were happy to have it back.

The Thunder surveyed teams across the league to see if there was interest in the NBA making the process full-time, league sources said, but they found little traction. Preseason scheduling is one of the final challenges for teams and one they don’t want to give up.

“It’s a fascinating, unknown part of the NBA ecosystem,” Beaven said. “We are very happy that we remained in control. We lean into it. I think there are some teams that probably do that to check the box.”

(Photo from Celtics and Nuggets preseason game in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates: Garrett Ellwood / NBAE via Getty Images)