Pighin/Team Travel

Gregg Drinnan has more on the Evan Pighin story on his blog......sounds like Hockey Canada's decision upheld the WHL's suspension of Pighin from playing in the BCHL, but the two sides then negotiated an agreement allowing Pighin to continue playing in for Victoria. I think Darrell May and the Chilliwack Bruins may not be all that happy with what transpired since they have the league's 2nd-worst offence and could have used Pighin....but if he wasn't going to play there, he wasn't going to play there.

For my second item today, this one took some work but it answers a question I was asked a week or so back: which WHL team does the most travelling during the season? So what I did was I took each team's schedule and added up the distance they travelled to get to each game. To illustrate what I did, here's a snippet of Brandon's schedule, just picked at random. The date, the game, and how many kilometers Brandon had to travel to get there:

Sat Dec 27	Regina @ Brandon	0
Tue Dec 30	Brandon @ Lethbridge	1033
Wed Dec 31	Brandon @ Kootenay	315
Sat Jan 3	Brandon @ Regina	970
Sun Jan 4	Regina @ Brandon	378
Tue Jan 6	Brandon @ Swift Current	630
Fri Jan 9	Saskatoon @ Brandon	630
Sat Jan 10	Edmonton @ Brandon	0

ie, to get to the Lethbridge game on the 30th, they drive 1033 km from where they are on the 27th (at home), then 315 km more to Kootenay from Lethbridge for the game on the 31st. Then 970 km from Kootenay to Regina for the game on the 3rd, etc - although in that case, the total distance might actually be more because they probably go home first and then back to Regina a couple days later. But it's far too much work to try and account for all those possibilities, so I'm just basing this on the travel from a game-to-game basis.

So without any further blathering, here's the league-wide totals for the season....I've included a miles conversion as well, for American readers who are probably more comfortable working with that.

	Kms	Miles
Brandon	30170	18102
Kootenay	26562	15937
Prince George	26552	15931
Edmonton	26270	15762
Red Deer	24520	14712
Spokane	24417	14650
Kamloops	24225	14535
Prince Albert	23957	14374
Portland	23762	14257
Kelowna	23225	13935
Lethbridge	23192	13915
Tri-City	22955	13773
Swift Current	22485	13491
Moose Jaw	22417	13450
Chilliwack	22412	13447
Calgary	22325	13395
Saskatoon	21707	13024
Everett	21698	13019
Vancouver	21625	12975
Medicine Hat	21513	12908
Seattle	21293	12776
Regina	19953	11972

No surprise that Brandon - the league's easternmost team - and Prince George - the northernmost and most remote - are at or near the top of the list. Kootenay being #2 did surprise me a bit since geographically they are pretty centralized in the league, but when you think about it, they are pretty far away from even some of their divisional opponents (Kootenay to Edmonton = 708 km) who they have to visit a lot.

And Regina has the cushiest schedule....it's shorter for all the Eastern division teams this year because they don't have to make the U.S. trip (and longer for Central teams, who do) but even at that, I was surprised to see Regina does the least travelling. Guess it helps to be no more than 415 km from any of your divisional foes.