A season schedule is not assembled evenly. A small number of dates are decided first because they are contracted, and everything else is arranged around them.
Showcase dates are sold before they are scheduled
Certain days deliver unusually large audiences because most people are not working, and broadcasters buy those slots specifically as part of the national package.
The league therefore commits to staging attractive fixtures on those dates before it knows anything else about the calendar, and the matchups are chosen for appeal rather than balance.
Opening week functions the same way, since the return of the sport carries attention that a midwinter fixture cannot generate whatever the teams involved.
Arena availability constrains everything else
Most arenas host other tenants and a schedule of concerts and events, and those bookings are made far ahead and cannot simply be displaced.
Schedulers receive a list of unavailable dates from each venue and must build a season inside the remaining gaps, which is the largest single constraint on the process.
A team whose building is heavily booked ends up with a more awkward calendar, including longer road trips, purely because of when its arena was free.
Travel is minimised by routing, not by fixture choice
Once the fixed dates and unavailable dates are set, the remaining games are ordered to cluster road trips geographically and to limit games on consecutive nights.
Those objectives conflict, since a compact road trip can require playing on successive evenings, and the scheduler balances them against limits agreed with the players' association.
Modern scheduling uses optimisation software to search enormous numbers of arrangements, because the constraint set is far too large to satisfy by hand.
Flexible selection is built into the contract
Broadcasters generally hold the right to change some later-season fixtures within a notice period, swapping a game that has become meaningless for one that matters.
That flexibility is valuable because the schedule is written before anyone knows which teams will be competing for position in the closing weeks.
The notice period protects ticket holders and travelling supporters, and its length is one of the more contested points in any rights negotiation.
Balance is a constraint, not the objective
Competitive fairness requires each team to play a defined mix of opponents home and away, and the scheduler treats that as a rule to satisfy rather than a goal to optimise.
Within those rules, considerable discretion remains over when each fixture falls, and that discretion is exercised commercially.
The published schedule is therefore a feasible solution to a heavily constrained problem, with the most valuable dates fixed at the start and the rest fitted around them.
