A deeper look at the NHL schedule

by Dirk Hoag on Jul 15, 2007 11:04 PM EDT

Last season the topic of epic NHL road travels came up, with perhaps the worst being a home-and-home series between St. Louis and Colorado which had the teams playing one night in Denver, then traveling some 850 miles to play again the next night in St. Louis. Rather than dig through the schedule line by line and look for similar instances this season, I thought I'd bring the wonderful power of spreadsheets to bear on the problem.

And then I thought, the heck with just distance traveled, let's toss some other information in there as well, and open it up so any out there who wants to examine different aspects of the upcoming NHL schedule can do so on their own. So I'd like to present to you my "NHL Super Schedule", published online over at Google Spreadsheets and free for anyone to download and utilize how they see fit.

It may choke your browser to work with it on Google, but I believe you can easily save it off into Excel or Open Office as you prefer.

So what's in there? Let's walk through the columns I've set up:

Team: The team's 3 letter abbreviation (i.e. ANA, BUF)
Game: The game number within that team's 82-game schedule
Date: Day of game
Visitor: Visiting team's name
Home: Home team's name
Time: Time of game, all in Eastern Time
Days Gap: Days since that team's previous game (i.e. back-to-back = 1)
Distance: Distance in miles (as the crow flies) from the previous game. All Game 1's set to 0. All values obtained from a Google Maps mashup posted here.
Division: Division of the team in question
Opponent: Opponent's 3 letter abbreviation
Opp Win%: Opponent's win percentage from the 2006-7 regular season
Opp G/G: Opponent's Goals Per Game from 2006-7
Opp GA/G: Opponent's Goals Allowed Per Game from 2006-7
Opp 5-5 F/A: Opponent's 5-on-5 Goals For/Against Ratio from 2006-7
Opp PP%: Opponent's Power Play % from 2006-7
Opp PK%: Opponent's Penalty Kill % from 2006-7
Opp Shts/G: Opponent's Shots Per Game from 2006-7
Opp SA/G: Opponent's Shots Allowed Per Game from 2006-7

So how can you use this? Checking out who has the furthest to travel for games on consecutive nights is a start. That honor goes to the Vancouver Canucks, who play at Edmonton on November 20, then have to fly 1,090 miles to play the Wild in Minnesota the next evening. You can summarize and sort the teams based on greatest and least travel. Who's going to face the toughest defensive teams on the road this year? Whose goalie is going to see the most rubber flying his way? How do the divisions compare?

I don't know the answer to many of these questions (yet). But I've done the work in putting this spreadsheet together, and now you can look for them yourself, and probably come up with more interesting questions to ask as well. Enjoy, and by all means leave your suggestions for additional columns. I plan on beefing this up considerably over the course of the season.

Tweet Comment 17 comments | 0 recs |

Do you like this story?

Comments

Awesome, thanks for posting.

This is going to be fun to play with.

by Paul Nicholson on Jul 16, 2007 9:18 AM EDT reply actions

Thanks for putting this together. I was thinking about writing something on Atlanta's schedule and this goes beyond what I was planning to do.

I hope to drive up to Nashville for the Predators-Thrashers matchup this year. It is on Thursday night but I expect a fair number of people to make the trip from ATL.

by The Falconer on Jul 16, 2007 11:04 AM EDT reply actions

Worst Week (7 day period):
Chicago Jan 3-9
5 games in 7 days all in different locations (3549 miles traveled)

Note: 8 other teams have a 5 in 7, but Chicago travels the furthest for theirs.

Runner up

Worst 4 game stretch:
San Jose Feb 17-21
Only team that plays 4 Games in 5 days this year.

by Matt on Jul 16, 2007 11:55 AM EDT reply actions

Wow - as if being a Chicago Blackhawk wasn't bad enough already... Great digging, Matt!

by The Forechecker on Jul 16, 2007 12:03 PM EDT reply actions

Good job, thanks for sharing !

by Bubba on Jul 16, 2007 1:52 PM EDT reply actions

have you thought of adding timezones to the equation? i remember hearing rhetoric last year about X eastern team playing almost all their games in their own time zone, while Y western team might play 3 different timezones in one road trip, etc. i'd like to see how that breaks down (most time zones in one road trip, one week, one month. fewest games outside your home zone, fewest games 2 or more time zones away, etc.)

by Anonymous on Jul 16, 2007 1:53 PM EDT reply actions

I like that suggestion about time zones. I'll add a sheet in the document to keep a running feature-request list for all to see.

by The Forechecker on Jul 16, 2007 2:31 PM EDT reply actions

Anyone feeling like their team got the shaft in the schedule just look at the Blues' March... featuring a NINE game road trip.

by chris on Jul 16, 2007 9:56 PM EDT reply actions

Road Trips

3 Teams have 9 game road trips:

Anaheim Feb ? -12
New Jersey Oct ? -25
St. Louis Mar ?-23

Kings, Flyers and Sharks have 8 game trips

Thrashers, Sabres, Blackhwaks and Leafs each have 7 game trips.

8 more teams have 6 game trips, but the kicker here is that the Blackhawks and Flyers have both a 6 game road trip and a 7 game road trip.

4 teams wind up with a 4 game road trip being their longest: Rangers, Penguins, Lightning and Canucks. In fact the lightning only have a single road trip that lasts 4 games

Interestingly, the home stands are a lot shorter. The longest homestand is 7, and only three teams have one that long: Ducks, Flames and Panthers.

For 7 teams, the longest homestand is 4, and the Blackhwaks take the "lead" here as well with only 2 homestands of 4 games. The others are Wild, Canadiens, Preds, Sens, Pens, Blues and Canucks.

by Matt on Jul 17, 2007 9:30 AM EDT reply actions

Did you realize that you have Penguins @ Hurricanes listed twice on October 5th? Hope this helps.

by Anonymous on Aug 20, 2007 1:16 PM EDT reply actions

Actually, every game appears twice, with a record from each team's perspective.

by The Forechecker on Aug 20, 2007 1:51 PM EDT reply actions

Sorry, I should have said "listed as a road game for both teams on October 5th." My bad.

by Anonymous on Aug 20, 2007 2:36 PM EDT reply actions

Thanks for the catch - I've made the correction!

by The Forechecker on Aug 20, 2007 3:21 PM EDT reply actions

too bad the date is a text entry?

by rutski on Sep 22, 2007 1:28 AM EDT reply actions

anaheim travelling 15000 miles before their first home game? i'd hate to see it they didn't win the cup....

by rutski on Oct 6, 2007 5:30 PM EDT reply actions

it would be nice to add the number of games per month for each team

by jean-francois on Oct 6, 2008 11:17 AM EDT reply actions

J-F: You should be able to do that on your own. Just take Column D, which has the date, and make a new column with the following formula in row 2 and copy it all the way down: =MID(D2,4,3). This will strip out the month, and then you should be able to either use a pivot table or sort & subtotal to get the number of games per team per month...

If that's too much Excellery, just send me a note and I'd be glad to do it for you.

by The Forechecker on Oct 6, 2008 12:14 PM EDT reply actions