There’s not much mystery to an NBA team’s schedule, but the grind of the 82-game slate includes all sorts of little morsels to digest. The Atlanta Hawks’ sked will include a few quirks this upcoming season, as the team tries to replicate its magical 60-win 2014-15 campaign:
• The Hawks will take the unusual step of hosting their weekday home games at 8 p.m. local time. The brass looked at a sample of regular-season and playoff games, and the data showed a 30 percent increase in butts in seats at tipoff for the later games. Add in the mess of construction next door at the Georgia Dome and Atlanta’s snarling traffic, and the Hawks felt the later starts were an experiment worth trying.
• Every NBA team plays 10 of its 14 conference opponents four times, and the remaining four only three times. Accordingly, the Hawks will see Brooklyn and Milwaukee twice at home, and once on the road. Meanwhile, Cleveland and Philadelphia will each play at Philips Arena only once. In the case of the Cavs, that can’t please the Hawks’ bean counters, though it might help in the standings.
• The Hawks don’t play a true contender until Game No. 15, when they travel to Cleveland. They’re unlikely to be an underdog in any of those first 14 games with the exception of road dates at Miami and New Orleans, and neither of those matchups are awful.
• The Hawks weren’t expected to make much noise last season -- Vegas had the preseason over-under win total at 40.5 -- and appeared nationally on ESPN only three times during the regular season, and never on TNT. Coming off a boffo 2014-15, the Hawks are scheduled for six ESPN dates, and two early-season games on TNT.
• Last season, the Hawks had nine games in which they played the night before and their opponent hadn’t -- and that figure will hold this season. But Atlanta caught a break on the flip side. In 2014-15, they played only four games with rest while their opponents were on back-to-backs. This season, they’ll have the advantage 10 times.
• Each NBA team will play an average of 17.8 back-to-backs, and the Hawks drew 19. Two of those back-to-backs will be at home, and one will be in Los Angeles in early March. As a side note, the Hawks will get to put down stakes at Shutters in Santa Monica for six consecutive nights, as they have two off days on each side of that Lakers-Clippers back-to-back -- not the worst thing in the world. They’ll have two four-in-fives this season versus two in 2014-15, both of them in November.
• Atlanta doesn’t have one of those interminable road trips this season. Their longest will be five games (that aforementioned West Coast swing). But they’ll also have only two homestands of four games and nine days apiece, which is somewhat unusual.
• The Hawks will travel a total of 42,933 miles during the regular season, which would earn them only Silver Medallion status on hometown carrier Delta.
