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]…