SOS

In sports, strength of schedule (SOS) refers to the difficulty or ease of a team’s/person’s opponent as compared to other teams/persons. This is especially important if teams in a league do not play each other the same number of times.

Strength of schedule is often displayed in two ways. In some cases, it is measured in distance from the average. As such, approximately half of teams’ strength of schedules is positive numbers, and approximately half are negative numbers. The higher the number, the stronger the schedule.

In other places, a team’s strength of schedule is just displayed as a rank among all teams. In this case, the lower the number, the stronger the schedule.

In the National Basketball Association (NBA), the 30 teams are all guaranteed to face each other at least twice in an 82-game regular season, although intra-division games are more frequent (as much as four times) than inter-conference games (twice).