I am excited to be teaching a Sports and Math class at the Bauer College of Business at the University of Houston. I have developed many cool spreadsheets for the class. One of them computes the total distance each team travels during the season. The results are shown below. It might surprise you that Minnesota travels the most miles. The reason probably is that Minnesota is one of the more eastern (and certainly more northern!) teams in the Western Conference so none of their Western Conference road games are very close. Golden State and Portland travel the 2nd and 3rd most miles, while the Cavs travel the least. At least Cleveland leads in something!
| Team | Distance | Rank |
| Atlanta Hawks | 45052.2 | 11 |
| Boston Celtics | 45431.87 | 8 |
| Brooklyn Nets | 39421.44 | 25 |
| Charlotte Bobcats | 40745.3 | 21 |
| Chicago Bulls | 39108.15 | 26 |
| Cleveland Cavaliers | 37798.78 | 30 |
| Dallas Mavericks | 40183.59 | 24 |
| Denver Nuggets | 43327.77 | 17 |
| Detroit Pistons | 40289.5 | 23 |
| Golden State Warriors | 50972.03 | 2 |
| Houston Rockets | 45290.23 | 9 |
| Indiana Pacers | 38780.76 | 29 |
| Los Angeles Clippers | 43359.53 | 16 |
| Los Angeles Lakers | 49590.15 | 5 |
| Memphis Grizzlies | 45128 | 10 |
| Miami Heat | 43474.76 | 15 |
| Milwaukee Bucks | 42305.02 | 19 |
| Minnesota Timberwolves | 53690.74 | 1 |
| New Orleans Pelicans | 41854.55 | 20 |
| New York Knicks | 42499.81 | 18 |
| Oklahoma City Thunder | 46324.89 | 7 |
| Orlando Magic | 43560.7 | 14 |
| Philadelphia 76ers | 38952.76 | 28 |
| Phoenix Suns | 50295.17 | 4 |
| Portland Trail Blazers | 50655.88 | 3 |
| Sacramento Kings | 44459.92 | 13 |
| San Antonio Spurs | 48876.06 | 6 |
| Toronto Raptors | 40346.38 | 22 |
| Utah Jazz | 44497.62 | 12 |
| Washington Wizards | 39030.74 | 27 |
Why the big disparity between the Lakers and the Clippers?
Comment by Eric — February 3, 2014 @ 8:41 pm
Really cool stuff. I had done this with the NFL this year (got the team/stadium co-ordinates off of wikipedia), got the fixtures list and got Excel to calculate the Haversine formula for me between the two points and totalled it up. Out of interest, does distance travelled have any effect on expected wins or predicted points (e.g. teams travelling over say 1300 miles to a game, score 8 points per game less than expected via the Stern approach or teams travelling over 45,000 miles per season, have 3 less pythagorean wins than expected etc.).
Comment by George — February 4, 2014 @ 4:13 pm
Good question. I guess sequence of games caused the disparity because they place in same place and play same opponents.
Comment by wwinston — February 4, 2014 @ 5:14 pm
Thanks. Have not had time to check on travel impact. I am going to look at back to backs and 4 in 5 nights.
Comment by wwinston — February 4, 2014 @ 5:14 pm
I’d also be interested to see which team has the most STD’s.
Comment by Thomas Schultz — February 6, 2014 @ 3:26 am
Thanks. I have added individual Home Field Advantages to my least squares model (it reduced the sum on average by about 5% but have only tried this for the NFL so far though), and then tried to do an adjustment based on travelled distance e.g. points added or subtracted from a teams total based on distance travelled for the opposing team say solving a variable for teams travelling 0-500 miles, 500-1500 miles, and 1500-3000miles - but it didn’t work out very well or make that much difference (less than 1% on average). I just figure there will be a cut-off distance which will make a difference.
Comment by George — February 6, 2014 @ 4:25 pm