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]:

 

Distance Traveled by NBA Teams during a Season

Have you ever wondered how many miles teams/players travel during typical NBA season?
If you have… well, you can join this one-member club! ;-)

Because even though it probably doesn’t matter now (with private jets and great service provided to the players can it have any effect on their performance?) it’s a trivia which has made me curious for some time…

So to calculate average distance traveled by NBA teams during a typical season I used schedule from insidehoops.com, latitude and longitude of U.S. and Canadian Cities from infoplease.com and an algorithm converting it into distance in miles from meridianworlddata.com. Additionally, I wanted to include some information about long-ish journeys so based on distribution I set a bar at 800 miles.

Results for the last 2 years are…
1.344.475 miles traveled by all NBA Teams in 2010/11 [44816 miles per team] and
1.360.641 miles traveled by all NBA Teams in 2009/10 [45355 miles per team].
To put it in context, every team travels around the world 11,5 times per season… and it’s without playoffs!

Here’s a more detailed breakdown for each team [numbers are rounded to the integer]…