Sticking to the schedule.

• Author: Schley, Stewart
• Position: Sports Biz - Sports scheduling, Bortz Media and Sports Group

THE NUGGETS COULDN'T PLAY AT HOME DURING THE last weekend in February because of back-to-back Freestyle Motocross events at Pepsi Center. Instead, the team was in Memphis on Friday and in New Orleans on Sunday night, the latter game dictating the Nuggets couldn't play a day game on Monday. Which was perfectly fine, because the players had to travel back to Denver anyway for a night game on Tuesday. Which would have left Wednesday available for another night home game, except that Pepsi Center was reserved for an Avalanche-Predators game scheduled before the NHL lockout.

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A Rubik's Cube is child's play compared to the computational puzzle that surrounds sports-league scheduling. Trying to squish thousands of games into the calendar while accounting for everything from Paul McCartney concerts to network TV demands is about as easy as nailing a three with Allen Iverson in your face. Scheduling means diving into a muddy brew of restrictions, parameters, rules, quirks, unanticipated changes, divisional conflicts, travel limitations and dozens of other ingredients that clamor for consideration.

Into this cauldron steps a mild-mannered mathematics wizard from Queens, N.Y., named Arthur Steiker. He's tall and thin, with a baritone voice that operates at a deliberate, measured cadence. Steiker also is the managing director of a Denver company that plays a big role in helping major sports leagues decide when teams will play each other.

Operating from the 14th floor of a Denver Tech Center tower, Bortz Media & Sports Group develops and licenses the software that gnaws its way through the knotty thicket of league scheduling requirements until it spits out schedules its league clients can approve. Customers including the National Basketball Association, National Hockey League and a handful of high-profile college conferences rely on Bortz Media to transform a slew of instructions into workable schedules.

The leagues themselves determine who plays when. But if you've attended a Nuggets game this year, you were there at least in part because Bortz Media's software determined that particular game could be scheduled at that particular time.

For Steiker, who earned a master's degree in mechanical engineering from the University of California-Berkeley, it's all about numbers. "I look at it as a mathematical problem, or a modeling problem," he says.

At a conference room in the Bortz Media office, Steiker displays an example of a...