25,000 miles of travel difference between first and last team in the NHL next season

[Zirakzigil]

Well, Penguins can’t fly so it makes sense.

I got @Three On Zero trained so well I dont even need to respond to Leo now.

Also, just because we choose not to fly doesnt mean we cant fly:

 

[StreetHawk]

How’s Colorado in the bottom half of the league? They’re one of the top 2 or 3 most isolated teams in the league. They get a lot of long road trips?

Utah is right next door and they are in the top of the mileage list without a trip to Europe. Exceed Colorado by 7,400 miles.

Really depends on how your road trips are setup and whether you have a lot of one off road games.

You are better off doing a 5-6 game trip vs more 3 game trips. Once you get to the East, the flights/bus rides from one city to the next are quite short, especially in the NE USA. Same goes if you can do all of the NW teams and Calif/LV in 1 trip each. And lucky to include Utah/Col on one of those as well.

 

[x Tame Impala]

The salary cap should account for this too. Unfair advantage and all

 

[Machinehead]

Once you're on a plane, you're on a plane. 2 hour vs 3 hour flight isn't a world of difference in your day, but that's a lot of miles adding up over the course of the year nevertheless.

It's not being on a plane that's disruptive, it's changing time zones.

If an East Coast team flies out to LA at 10:00 AM, by the time they land, it's just about 10:00 again. A game that starts at 7:00 PM local time is starting at 10:00 PM as far as their bodies are concerned. The whole second half of that game is being played when they're used to sleeping.

Similarly, when a West Coast team comes east at 10:00 AM, it's 5:00 PM when they land. The game is starting, for them, basically at 4:00 when they would typically be doing some other part of their routine.

By the time you get used to it, you go back home and get hit with the other side of it.

 

[JPT]

It's true but there's not a ton anyone can do about it.

Take solace in the fact that living in the megalopolis of the NE means you're more clustered together in an industrial wasteland or post-industrial Rust Belt, scrambling on top of one another to get ahead. Long travel means living in nicer places with better weather, cleaner air, and more room to yourself (well, maybe not so much in LA for that last bit). Quality of life versus easy proximity to your rivals.

I have at times wondered whether baseball-style series in one city could make sense for hockey. It would have been easier to pull off when you played your division opponents a lot more (up to eight times per season) in the early 2000s. It would certainly cut down on travel and raise the intensity/temperature as each series evolved.

Baseball parks typically aren't used for other events are they? I don't know, I don't live in an MLB city.

The salary cap should account for this too. Unfair advantage and all

Lmao hell yeah

 

[Three On Zero]

I got @Three On Zero trained so well I dont even need to respond to Leo now.

Also, just because we choose not to fly doesnt mean we cant fly:

1% trained, 99% work in progress

 

[PositiveCashFlow]

How is Wpg 7? They don't even have an airport

 

[FriendlyGhost92]

If I'm Anaheim management, I'm immediately bitching to the league about the 7,000 mile difference between their travel schedule and LA's.

Their arenas are 30 miles apart...

 

[bobholly39]

Pfft - typical anti-Pittsburgh bias in the NHL at play.

All the other teams get a ton of restful miles in first class on an airplane to relax - while Penguin players get the least of all. If this isn't proof that the league wants Penguins to be extra tired and lose more - I don't know what it is.

 

[Bandit]

Dallas should petition to make Texas smaller.

 

[StreetHawk]

If I'm Anaheim management, I'm immediately bitching to the league about the 7,000 mile difference between their travel schedule and LA's.

Their arenas are 30 miles apart...

You'd expect LA to have the worse travel because they share their arena with the Lakers/Clippers (but the Clippers are leaving for their new arena in the fall I believe), while Ana has no NBA team to share, so they get to set their home schedule the way they want.

Something is amiss for them.

 

[TheMoreYouKnow]

It's not being on a plane that's disruptive, it's changing time zones.

If an East Coast team flies out to LA at 10:00 AM, by the time they land, it's just about 10:00 again. A game that starts at 7:00 PM local time is starting at 10:00 PM as far as their bodies are concerned. The whole second half of that game is being played when they're used to sleeping.

Similarly, when a West Coast team comes east at 10:00 AM, it's 5:00 PM when they land. The game is starting, for them, basically at 4:00 when they would typically be doing some other part of their routine.

By the time you get used to it, you go back home and get hit with the other side of it.

Yes, but the league is structured in a way where this is minimized. All the PT teams are in the same division and that's about the most you can do for them. Unlike in the past there are also no longer any ET teams in the Western conference.

Obviously some amount of play between the teams in the West and those in the rest of the continent needs to occur, so there's always bound to be some of that, but it's minimized these days.

Dallas has the most travel simply because it's geographically the most isolated team, which seems logical to me. If your nearest NHL neighbors are all 600 miles away then you're going to rack up miles. But their travel is bound to be mostly short to medium length flights as they're also pretty centrally located. As far as time difference goes they're going to have a lot of 1-2 hour time differences but absolutely no 3 hour time differences.

I don't know what could be done to make any of that go away though. It's a league spanning a huge continent and people aren't evenly distributed across it.

 

[HolyGhost]

Florida and oilers in the top 4. Just saying

 

[Lt Dan]

Can ask the same question for Ana/LA, Sea/Van, and even Utah/Col (next door states).

If it's that big a margin and unless they were going to Europe, it means that the schedule maker wasn't very effecient on their road trips or you ended up on multiple shorter trips, thus have some wasted mileage. Always better to do longer trips to the East or West and knock off as many as you can.

Van's road trips this season all see very logical. Not perfect, but very limited overlap of of mileage.

LA and then Phoenix went to Australia

 

[Lshap]

Florida and oilers in the top 4. Just saying

I believe Edmonton and Ft. Lauderdale represents the longest commute in SCF history. Guessing #2 would be Montreal and LA.

 

[MCB]

Baseball parks typically aren't used for other events are they? I don't know, I don't live in an MLB city

I live in Anaheim and Angel's stadium is used for motor Cross events and what not in the summer along with concerts here and there, but it's usually not close to what an arena sees in traffic.

 

[StreetHawk]

Baseball parks typically aren't used for other events are they? I don't know, I don't live in an MLB city.

Baseball runs from like April to Sept. Once you get outside those months, weather can be an issue. I mean, most of the outdoor football stadiums don't have any non NFL events once you get into October, unless it's MLS like NE, CAR who share.

Concerts, you're kind of in between an indoor arena and an NFL stadium capacity to do it in a MLB stadium. Low 20's crowd.

 

[bland]

If I'm Anaheim management, I'm immediately bitching to the league about the 7,000 mile difference between their travel schedule and LA's.

Their arenas are 30 miles apart...

The Kings trip to Australia may have been a factor there.

 

[ijuka]

Sadly, NHL scheduling still lives in the stone age. It's not even all that difficult to optimize the schedule with AI so that each team's travel is minimized. Wouldn't be a very complex script, though might require a decent amount of computing power to run.

 

[squashmaple]

Surprised by Columbus. They're not that close to the teams in their division compared to the other Metro teams.

The schedule was kind this year with extended road trips instead of lots of back and forth. They've got a trip that includes the three California teams and Seattle, one that hits all of Canada from Winnipeg west, one that bunches up Vegas/Utah/Dallas, and one that bunches up all the NYC-area teams.

 

[JPT]

Sadly, NHL scheduling still lives in the stone age. It's not even all that difficult to optimize the schedule with AI so that each team's travel is minimized. Wouldn't be a very complex script, though might require a decent amount of computing power to run.

It's all fun and games using AI until one team is playing 802 games.

 

[ponder]

If anything I'm surprised the disparity in travel isn't even bigger, considering how concentrated NHL franchises are in the northeast:

That's simply where most people live in the US and Canada, and also where hockey is the most traditionally popular. The entire western half of America (and Canada) is very sparsely populated compared to the east, other than some higher population right on the Pacific coast - population heatmap below:

The teams are where the people are, more or less, other than a bit of under-representation in the US south (which makes sense given the lack of popularity of hockey in the south).

 

[GrumpyKoala]

Let's expand to Europe they said...

 

[mouser]

Clearly an unfair advantage for some of the east coast teams. The league should mandate every team flies the same amount of miles with the same number of out of town hotel stays.

For example, instead of the Rangers taking a bus ride to play the islanders, they should instead take a flight to Kansas City, stay there overnight, then fly back to NY the next day for the Isles game.

 

[Panteras]

I don’t ever wanna hear about taxes again.