Road warriors 09-10

With the release of the official WHL schedule on Monday, it's time for the annual look at WHL travel schedules. What I've done is taken each team's schedule and calculated how many kilometers they have to drive from each game to the next, then totaled the distances for each team over the entire season.

The chart below shows how many kilometers (and miles, for American readers) each team travels this upcoming season, as well as the +/- change in their kilometers from last season, and the team's rank in last year's list of most-travelled teams.

		km	miles	change	08-09 rank
1	Brandon	32052	19916	+2919	1
2	Edmonton	27626	17166	+2260	4
3	Prince George	26528	16484	+890	3
4	Kootenay	26314	16351	+666	2
5	Spokane	25830	16050	+2253	6
6	Prince Albert	25827	16048	+2694	8
7	Portland	25748	15999	+2803	9
8	Kelowna	25101	15597	+2675	10
9	Swift Current	24180	15025	+2469	13
10	Calgary	24056	14948	+2499	16
11	Tri-City	23533	14623	+1368	12
12	Saskatoon	23036	14314	+2076	17
13	Lethbridge	22825	14183	+431	11
14	Kamloops	22819	14179	-573	7
15	Red Deer	22721	14118	-956	5
16	Medicine Hat	22481	13969	+1708	20
17	Chilliwack	21757	13519	+116	15
18	Moose Jaw	21742	13510	+97	14
19	Vancouver	21496	13357	+615	19
20	Everett	20604	12803	-348	18
21	Seattle	19827	12320	-734	21
22	Regina	19220	11943	-47	22

Some (most?) changes can be explained by schedule variations, such as the East teams having to visit the U.S. teams this season whereas last year they didn't, etc.

For the 2nd year in a row, the Wheat Kings will rack up the most miles and bad movies on the iron lung, and it isn't even close - they'll travel 4400 more kilometers than the next-worst team and that is a huge amount when you consider that most teams are actually not that significantly worse off than the next guy.

Edmonton being #2 really surprised me, given that they have a couple of fairly close divisional opponents. In fact, they actually have it worse this year than the Cougars do. I think the difference is that the Cougars compensate for their travel by playing more games every time they go on the road - only once this season do they leave Prince George and play only one game on the road before returning home. Edmonton does that eight times; it adds up to more miles on the road in a hurry. If travel is an issue for the Oil Kings, they may need to look at making their travel schedule more efficient, similar to what the Cougars do.

And for the 2nd year in a row, the Regina Pats have the easiest schedule. I'm sure it helps them that they have a division rival practically down the street - those short 75 km hops to Moose Jaw beat the heck out of Prince George's 525 km trek to their nearest opponent, no? Seattle and Everett also share a very short commute with each other, as do Chilliwack and Vancouver, which all kind of makes the fact that those are the six lowest-travelled teams make a lot more sense.

Big savings for Red Deer too....I haven't analyzed their schedules to see what the big difference is but they have chopped almost 1000km off their travels this season and dropped from the 5th most travelled team in the league down to the 15th. You'd think not having to go to the U.S. cities this year might help the mileage, but all the other Central teams - who also don't visit the U.S. cities this year - all went up, some of them a lot. So, perhaps the Rebels just are making more efficient road trips this year.

Funny how the East division has both the most-travelled team and the least-travelled team....so which division has it easiest? Average travel distances (in km) for a team in each of the four divisions:

East: 24,343

Central: 24,337

U.S.: 23,540

B.C.: 23,109

So the East and Central are a virtual dead heat, only 6 km apart in average. The B.C. division has it easiest, with their teams travelling an average of 1200 km less than the Eastern conference teams. That's despite the B.C. division having one of the league's most far-flung teams in Prince George.