"We need to bring it in-house," Stirling told Winick. In 1985, Scotty Stirling, the NBA's vice president of operations, pulled the job back to the league office and assigned it to Winick.
The league later hired an outside firm to computerize the schedule. The schedule was handled by the legendary Eddie Gottlieb, who would painstakingly construct the entire thing by hand, on a yellow legal pad. Winick was one of 20 full-time employees in the league office.
#League schedule creator professional
There might not be a more complex or thankless job in professional sports than that of schedule-maker-and the complexity and thanklessness might be double in the NBA because of the competition for arena dates and the sheer impossibility of producing a calendar that seems equitable across 30 teams. But it was a helluva great day, I'll tell you."
"I don't know if it made up for the four months of agony. "Getting it done," Winick said with a prolonged chuckle and a snort. The puzzle is critical, fascinating, complex. There's nothing like the satisfaction of finishing a puzzle. There is a mix of pride and wistfulness and relief in his voice, all filtered through a New York accent. "I always described it as a jigsaw puzzle with 1,230 pieces" -one for every game -"and if one of them doesn't fit, it doesn't work," Winick said. Carelli's team produced the recently released 2015-16 schedule, the first without Winick's fingerprints since the 1984-85 season. The spreadsheet has been bequeathed to Tom Carelli, the league's senior vice president of broadcasting. The 75-year-old Winick, who first joined the NBA in 1976, is stepping down (not retiring, he insists) at the end of the month, taking with him four decades of memories, mementos and scheduling wisdom.
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