The NBA is about competition: Figuring how to maintain optimal performance over an 82-game regular-season schedule.
The NBA is about entertainment: Wherever and whenever two teams are told to play, the show must go on.
Charlotte Hornets president Fred Whitfield oversaw a special logistics challenge this season: How to get maximum global exposure from playing in the first regular-season game in Paris, while minimizing wear-and-tear on the players?
The Hornets and Milwaukee Bucks play Jan. 24 at Paris' Accorhotels Arena. The Hornets business operation lobbied for this for more than two years, feeling a preseason trip to China in 2015 was valuable marketing for both the team and owner Michael Jordan's "Jordan Brand" shoe-and-apparel business.
The Hornets made sense, since when the game was announced last winter, the Hornets had two prominent French players _ Tony Parker and Nicolas Batum. Parker, a future Hall of Famer, has since retired, but Batum still is on the roster.
But making sense of this to an incoming basketball operation _ general manager Mitch Kupchak and coach James Borrego _ was a bit of a sell. Whitfield worked hard in discussions with the NBA to mitigate the competitive downside of an 8,000-mile January round trip and two days of appearances concluding with the game against the Bucks.
"It's completely different" from preseason in 2015 against the Los Angeles Clippers in China, Whitfield said. "We have to take into account the toll it will take on the team _ the travel.
"As we started getting a feel for what our schedule would look like, we tied in Mitch and our basketball folks to say, 'What do we really need on the front side of the France game and what do we need happen on the back side?' _ from a rest perspective."
The result: The Hornets play just two games in a 12-day span between the end of the West Coast trip in Denver on Jan. 15 and a home game against the New York Knicks on Jan. 28. That's by far the least-busy stretch in a six-month Hornets regular season.
The Hornets play an afternoon home game on Martin Luther King Day on Monday, then fly by charter to Paris on Tuesday. They will practice and do a couple of appearances Wednesday and Thursday, then play the Bucks (and MVP Giannis Antetokounmpo, who is Greek) Friday (3 pm. EST).
The NBA has never held a regular-season game in France before, but the Washington Wizards and New York Knicks played a year ago in London. Whitfield spoke with his counterpart in Washington, Jim Van Stone, to see what could be learned from the Wizards' experience overseas.
Some Wizards players commented after the London trip that the travel to Britain didn't particularly wear them out, but the drain on their energy was more apparent when they returned to the United States.
The Hornets requested and received a buffer after the Paris game: They don't play again until Tuesday, and that is a home game against the Knicks. Also, they play only one game (at Washington) in the three days following the Knicks game.
"When we saw our (initial draft of a schedule) we saw we were likely to be home on Martin Luther King Day. So we really wanted an afternoon game," Whitfield said. "The league was great to work with: Getting us back home with a couple of days to rest and then a home game. And building in days to travel.
"That was really important to Mitch _ get rest, go, and then have rest again when we got back."
