Creating and editing schedule templates / schedule dates

[archibalduk]

Yes you could look at the 30 team NHL from 2006/07.

[Mackecool93]

Hi, im creating a 42 teams NHL/AHL/ECHL database and i got all working through trial and error bur the schedule just wont work as i want. If i use "Schedule Dates" i cant get teams to play "cross-conference" so they only play their own conference wich i guess can be ok but still not what i want. If i use the Schedule templates i can get 82 games, everyone plays everyone once at home and once away, fine so far, but almost every week all teams play fri/sat/sun so 3 games in three days and occasionally even 4 games in 4 days. Is there some way to alter which days the games take place, since now it is fri-sun and an occasional game outside of that when those three weekdays wont be enough for the 82 games.

So anyone got any suggestions on how to fix this so that i get(ideally) 82 games, all teams play the other 41 teams twice(once home once away) and with more reasonable game interval(no 3 or 4 days in a row).

[archibalduk]

Hi, im creating a 42 teams NHL/AHL/ECHL database and i got all working through trial and error bur the schedule just wont work as i want. If i use "Schedule Dates" i cant get teams to play "cross-conference" so they only play their own conference wich i guess can be ok but still not what i want. If i use the Schedule templates i can get 82 games, everyone plays everyone once at home and once away, fine so far, but almost every week all teams play fri/sat/sun so 3 games in three days and occasionally even 4 games in 4 days. Is there some way to alter which days the games take place, since now it is fri-sun and an occasional game outside of that when those three weekdays wont be enough for the 82 games.

So anyone got any suggestions on how to fix this so that i get(ideally) 82 games, all teams play the other 41 teams twice(once home once away) and with more reasonable game interval(no 3 or 4 days in a row).

As you say there are two ways of creating schedules in EHM: (1) Setting up schedule dates or (2) setting up a schedule template.

Schedule dates are useful because you can just list out some dates and let EHM generate a schedule. However, this approach is generally only workable for leagues without any divisions or conferences or where you have a league split into two divisions only (this is done by adding an inter-conference/division stage which schedules games between teams in opposite divisions). Otherwise schedule dates only relate to games between teams in that same particular stage. So this doesn't work for the NHL where the initial stage consists of two simultaneous stages (east and west conferences) within which there are multiple divisions. Hence you won't get the cross-conference scheduling you're expecting. If you're looking to have a very simple schedule where teams player other teams within their same conference a fixed number of times (e.g. a team plays all other teams in its own conference two times) and against the other conference teams a fixed number of times too (e.g. one time) then you could use the inter-conference setup. Take a look at the British EIHL from around 2015/16 and you will see how there are three simultaneous initial stages - i.e. Gardiner Conference, Erhardt Conference and inter-conference (aka overall standings) stage.

I'm assuming what you really want is where teams are scheduled by division (or even by club) rather than by conference (i.e. a traditional NHL schedule setup). This cannot be done using schedule dates and so you will need to manually create a schedule template. It sounds like you have used my schedule generator in the Editor as a starting point. The generator is somewhat limited right now and it seems to cluster/condense schedules too much as you say. So what I'd suggest is taking the generated schedule and then manually modifying it to spread out the games. You can either do this:

(1) from within the Editor by clicking on Schedule Templates -> NHL -> click on the Schedule List tab and you'll see the list of team IDs, day and month numbers and year offset; or

(2) via Excel by clicking on Schedule Templates -> NHL -> click on the Schedule List tab in the Editor and click on the 'Export Items' button at the bottom of the screen. This will allow you to export a spreadsheet which you can open in Excel. Once you have finished editing it, click on the 'Import Items (Replace)' button at the bottom of the Editor screen in order to import the schedule back into the database.

With either of the above approaches (either in the Editor or Excel), you can just change the day and month numbers in order to spread things out. If you move a date from December into January, you'll need to change the year offset from 0 to 1 (or vice versa if you switch the other way round). In the 2019/20 start date, year offset 0 means 2019 and year offset 1 means 2020 for the purposes of the schedule template.

[Mackecool93]

Thanks for the reply. I will will try and take a look at the league you proposed, is it an earlier TBL database you are refering to?
Edit: Found the league and database you meant, gonna take a look at it.

I have tried multiple solutions and the latest have been either 82 dates in the simpler schedule, which did give me only game within the conference. And that is as far is i have gotten with that alternative.

I have generated a 1722 games schedule template using your generator(which is great btw), and this schedule turns into a whole season of 3 games/team every fri-sun, not ideal. So i started to try and adjust it manually and being naive, though it was 82 dates with 21 games each within these 1722 games, and made a schedule with 82 dates and started to manually change the dates in the template. I realized kinda quickly that it wasnt that easy though, so im kinda stuck here, im not sure what to do. If i try to narrow it down to only 82 dates im bound to get stuck with some teams getting 2 games at one date, and starting to try and realign the games to different dates to make it work seem impossible(for me at least), and might even be impossible.

Edit: Also is there anyway, that maybe i missed, to decide which weekdays the template places the games on? As in my example above it seems to default to Saturday and Sunday, second priority Friday and then Wednesday for the first game and last(i put it like that), but i cant seem to find any way to change which days its supposed to generate on, so is there an option for that?

Anyone have any suggestions for how to attack the template in a good way? I dont know really how to do it, maybe trial and error(manually changing dates, starting a save, look for problems, rinse and repeat)? Would love to know if anyone of you that already have created schedules for other leagues have any tips and tricks.

Thanks for the help, and thanks archi for your amazing work with the site and the editor

[archibalduk]

I have generated a 1722 games schedule template using your generator(which is great btw), and this schedule turns into a whole season of 3 games/team every fri-sun, not ideal.

I'm going to look into the schedule generator either this weekend or next to see if I can add an option to select what days are used or at least to make the spread a little more random. I've got a few things on my to list for the next Editor release including this.

So i started to try and adjust it manually and being naive, though it was 82 dates with 21 games each within these 1722 games, and made a schedule with 82 dates and started to manually change the dates in the template. I realized kinda quickly that it wasnt that easy though, so im kinda stuck here, im not sure what to do. If i try to narrow it down to only 82 dates im bound to get stuck with some teams getting 2 games at one date, and starting to try and realign the games to different dates to make it work seem impossible(for me at least), and might even be impossible.

I wonder if we could have some sort of separate tool to help adjust things... In the meantime, you could spread out the games held on Friday to other days of the week. So perhaps a few on the preceding Tuesday and others on the preceding Thursday. This would give a bit of a gap between the weekend games and you wouldn't have to worry about schedule clashes if you take it week by week.

You could in fact alternate each week. So for one week's round of games, split the Friday games over the preceding Monday and Tuesday. For the next round of games, you could split the Saturday games between Tuesday and Thursday. Then for the next round, do the same for the Sunday games and so forth. This should give you a nice spread without having to spend too much time worrying about clashes, etc.

Thanks for the help, and thanks archi for your amazing work with the site and the editor

Thank you that's very kind!

[Mackecool93]

I wonder if we could have some sort of separate tool to help adjust things... In the meantime, you could spread out the games held on Friday to other days of the week. So perhaps a few on the preceding Tuesday and others on the preceding Thursday. This would give a bit of a gap between the weekend games and you wouldn't have to worry about schedule clashes if you take it week by week.

You could in fact alternate each week. So for one week's round of games, split the Friday games over the preceding Monday and Tuesday. For the next round of games, you could split the Saturday games between Tuesday and Thursday. Then for the next round, do the same for the Sunday games and so forth. This should give you a nice spread without having to spend too much time worrying about clashes, etc.

Thank you for this tip, doing this was so easy that i feel silly for not thinking of it. I worked on fixing it my way for probably 2-3 hours in total with nothing to show, following your suggestion took 5min and worked perfectly. Sometimes the easier way is the right way, thanks again.

[archibalduk]

Excellent - glad to hear!

[Mackecool93]

Only problem now seems to be that every team will play both games against 3-4 teams in the first month but after this i consider that a problem for another day, im satisified with the results

[ideawithoutamind]

Hey all, long time lurker,
But getting a bit heavy in the db editing and customization since this pandemic started.

I've started to build a schedule building tool. (it's mostly done in SQL and it's run locally right now, but may be able to publish once I'm more comfortable with it or put it in another format. But I'd be happy to test a few schedules out for anyone building any links.

All I'd need to know is league setup:
Divisions per conference
Teams per divisions
How often teams play each other leaguewide, conference-wise, division-wide.

I've run a few tests with a 36 team league and 100 games per team schedules with pretty good success, but would love to collaborate with anyone else that needs/wants the help!

[Mgomrjsurf]

Looking for one that's Geographical that has KC in Midwest and Orlando in Florida Division because not good at creating one with that Divisional setup.

[ideawithoutamind]

I was just wondering if there was a database, that had 30 teams in it so that i could use their database from the ehm 1 editor as im doing a database from 2006-2007 and that had 27 AHL teams and i want to have 30 AHL teams

What is the division setup?

There are some dbs that have 30 team ones, but it depends on the division setup.

I've made one or two 30 team schedules, but can try to port over depending on the schedule.

[archibalduk]

I've started collecting schedule templates and structures here in case it's of any use to anyone else: https://github.com/archibalduk/EHM-League-Structures