About the NBA Calendar App
Purpose
This tool helps us digest and analyze the NBA calendar from both team and league perspectives.
Definitions
In this tool, game location and team rest are examined in various ways. Game location includes not just whether a team plays at home or on the road, but also travel distance, time zone changes, and trip sequences (as conveyed on the map). Team rest encompasses the number of idle days between games, whether this figure is higher (advantage / plus) or lower (disadvantage / minus) relative to an opponent, and back-to-back matchups.
In their raw forms, rest advantages and disadvantages are merely descriptive. John Schuhmann notes, for example, that teams with two days of rest had a -0.1 net rating against teams with one day of rest in 631 games between the 2015-16 and 2017-18 seasons. However, there's evidence of a meaningful advantage for a rested team that plays against an unrested team. See this 2012 Inpredictable post, which describes differing home court adjustments based on rest, and the Fields Sports Analytics workshop materials that Michael Lopez references here . Hence 'true' rest advantages and disadvantages are highlighted in the schedule dashboard.
Programs
This tool is built in R using the Shiny Dashboard, Plotly, Leaflet, and DT packages, among many others.