The signed Willis Reed print was a gift from Reed, who was a Knicks rookie when Winick worked for the team. On this day, Winick's 16th-floor office is cluttered with boxes and bubble wrap and dusty reference guides. An era is coming to a close at Olympic Tower. More automation, more algorithm-driven scheduling, less human touch.
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It's all changing now, with new hands at the controls and more advanced software driving the process. And sometimes the answer would hit him at 3 a.m., stirring him awake. "You go to sleep thinking about: How can I get this team to here?" Winick said.
Though Winick's spreadsheet had some constraints built in -disallowing a double-booking, for instance -it was not automated Winick assigned all 1,230 games himself, through a painstaking process that took months. There are more teams, of course, and more national television obligations and more variables at work. There are few such battles today, with the NBA now a multibillion-dollar global enterprise, its games in high demand. I remember going to a playoff game that we had to play on like a Tuesday afternoon, because that was the only date we could get up there." … We'd fight over playoff dates, we'd fight over everything. It disturbed a Bruins practice that the Celtics had to play a game or something. "They took us reluctantly," Winick said of the Garden, which was run by the NHL's Bruins. Scheduling games at the Boston Garden, even during the Larry Bird era, required a lot of negotiations with the NHL's Bruins. "I said, 'Look, you sonofabitch, I gave you what you wanted! I didn't tell you to get fired!'" Winick recalled with a smile and laugh. The next time the two crossed paths, the coach groused that his old team had a better schedule than his new team. The coach got fired before the new season began and landed with a divisional rival. "How do you put that in a computer?"Īnother year, a head coach asked Winick to give his team more home games on the first night of a back-to-back. "Why? It was the owner's son's bar mitzvah," he said, chuckling. Winick once had an owner lobby him not to schedule his team a specific weekend. "So the lifetime job lasted a long time," he said.Įvery year brings different obstacles and off-the-wall requests. Winick lets the line hang in the air for a moment, then chuckles and snorts again. "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.
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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.