The 30 teams in the NBA are each assigned to one of six divisions, where each division has five teams.

Suppose the goal is to assign the teams to divisions so that the average distance among teams in the divisions is minimized. In other words, the goal is to make the assignments so that teams within a division are close to one another. The file P08_24.xlsx contains distances between all NBA cities. (Actually, this was before the Seattle SuperSonics switched to Oklahoma City.) Use Evolutionary Solver to find an optimal assignment of teams to divisions. Does it turn out that your assignments to divisions are the same as the NBA’s? (Hint: Arrange the 30 teams into six contiguous blocks of five teams each. Each block will have five team indexes. With an AllDifferent constraint, you can ensure that the 30 team indexes are all different.

For each block, use lookups to find all distances between pairs of teams in that block and average these. Then average these averages over the six divisions to obtain the objective value.)