Journey through Miles of NBA Travel History

In my last post about Distance Traveled by NBA Teams during a Season I offered an innocent curiosity… but quite typically for me it lead to more questions plus more serious questions… and man, I went big this time.

Instinctively I wrote about Portland’s loneliness on the US map with recent team’s relocations from Seattle and Vancouver and then I hit me… wait a second, I can check the influence of those changes!
Average journey for each NBA team in a single season? That’s nice… but how about the whole history?
I could finally settle the issue how amount of travel actually has changed through league’s history!

So while I was fired up I got my hands dirty, this time with schedules from basketball-reference.com
[but I still used latitude and longitude of U.S. and Canadian Cities from infoplease.com and an algorithm converting it into distance in miles from meridianworlddata.com] but before we look at the results a couple of technical notes which you should keep in mind:

– I totally ignored random games in temporary locations but I included changes which lasted at least a season. So for example, Nets spent one year in New York so I accounted for that in calculations but if the same Nets played a game in Kansas due to some difficulties I assumed they played at home. In recent decades this point probably doesn’t matter but in early days of the NBA it could have some impact.

– I totally ignored exhibition games like those in London or Tokyo and I assumed they were played in team’s arena. There were few of them and I prefered to save some time than play with such details.

– This batch of numbers in some cases is slightly different than in my previous post because there I used scheduled games and here I used games when they actually happened [so any postponed games made a tiny difference here].

OK, that’s enough, here’s what I dug out from that goldmine of information so far…

Let’s start with a graph of Total Journeys by NBA Teams Over 800 Miles per Season [which is easier to digest version of Total Miles Traveled per team because there’s a 0.99 correlation between those two]:

… and here’s a big one: Average Miles Traveled by NBA Team per Season per Game Since 1952

Even though there’s a lot of data involved I think conclusions are pretty simple:

1)Shockingly in the 60s players traveled more per game than in the 90s!
And in a worse means of transport. Yikes…

2) Expansion through US cities obviously added a lot of total miles for each team,

3) Changing divisions for Chicago, San Antonio and Houston before 1980-81 season worked out nicely…

4) In the last 20 years NBA either used similar schedule or they figured out the most optimal version of it.

Finally, here’s a breakdown for each city/team:

City/Team	Start	Finish	Average Miles Traveled per Game since 1952	Games	# Over 800 Miles	% of Such games
San Francisco	1963	1971	780,59	729	213	29,22
Miami	1989	2011	696,73	1854	872	47,03
Vancouver	1996	2001	680,79	460	163	35,43
Seattle	1968	2008	657,77	3330	1159	34,80
Portland	1971	2011	647,7	3330	1204	36,16
LA Lakers	1961	2011	644,7	4136	1445	34,94
San Diego	1968	1984	641,51	820	281	34,27
Minnesota	1990	2011	640,45	1772	751	42,38
Houston	1972	2011	633,37	3248	1371	42,21
San Antonio	1977	2011	630,93	2838	1239	43,66
Golden State	1972	2011	610,61	3248	803	24,72
Orlando	1990	2011	606,83	1772	738	41,65
New Orleans	1975	2011	601,83	984	353	35,87
Denver	1977	2011	592,06	2838	1253	44,15
Phoenix	1969	2011	591,69	3494	1133	32,43
Sacramento	1986	2011	589,02	2100	537	25,57
Oklahoma City	2006	2011	583,84	410	139	33,90
Memphis	2002	2011	577,59	820	231	28,17
Utah	1980	2011	575,1	2592	739	28,51
Dallas	1981	2011	569,25	2510	904	36,02
LA Clippers	1985	2011	557,53	2182	713	32,68
Kansas City	1973	1985	552,28	1066	292	27,39
Atlanta	1969	2011	533,8	3494	583	16,69
St. Louis	1956	1968	523,33	1005	270	26,87
Charlotte	1989	2011	507,49	1690	288	17,04
Boston	1952	2011	503,47	4780	1226	25,65
NY Nets	1977	1977	496,65	82	14	17,07
New York	1952	2011	489,4	4779	879	18,39
Milwaukee	1952	2011	483,71	3775	769	20,37
Buffalo	1971	1978	479,16	656	118	17,99
New Jersey	1978	2011	476,4	2756	483	17,53
Washington	1974	2011	475,03	3084	553	17,93
Toronto	1996	2011	471,09	1280	230	17,97
Indiana	1977	2011	465,59	2838	574	20,23
Philadelphia	1952	2011	464,24	4698	833	17,73
Chicago	1962	2011	460,32	3817	756	19,81
Rochester	1952	1957	446,53	424	135	31,84
Detroit	1958	2011	446,33	4355	669	15,36
Cleveland	1971	2011	445,05	3330	592	17,78
Minneapolis	1952	1960	435,45	643	143	22,24
Cincinnati	1958	1972	413,32	1189	97	8,16
Syracuse	1952	1963	402,83	883	118	13,36
Baltimore	1952	1973	381,44	1021	111	10,87
Fort Wayne	1952	1957	321,4	423	17	4,02
Indianapolis	1952	1953	316,68	137	15	10,95

Well, if amount of travel was NBA’s goal then Vancouver and Seattle deserved to lose a team…
and Portland might be next! On the other hand there’s still a midwest bias ;-)

Also, have I found a reason why relocation to San Francisco might not be a good idea?

P.S. If you want to know something specific from this dataset, let me know in the comments.

Also so much data led to another post about Patterns in All-Time NBA Schedule.