What is Travel Distance?

The total miles or kilometers a team has traveled between cities for recent road games.

What this tells us

When a team has logged heavy travel — say, a cross-country road trip or multiple back-to-backs in different time zones — they tend to play worse the next game. Travel Distance tells you how much geographic ground the team has covered lately, which correlates with fatigue and jet lag.

Limitations

Travel Distance is a schedule-based metric that doesn't account for how rest days are distributed, time zones crossed, or individual player sleep and recovery habits. A team that travels 2,000 miles over five days with a rest day in the middle is in a different position than a team that travels the same distance in three games with back-to-backs. It's a useful signal but not a complete picture of travel fatigue.

How PuckLab calculates this

Travel Distance is calculated from the official NHL schedule plus city-to-city distances (great-circle distance between team arena locations). PuckLab does not use player-tracking data or on-ice skating metrics of any kind.

Example

A team on a seven-game west-coast road trip might accumulate 4,000+ miles of travel over two weeks. Teams coming off heavy travel schedules — especially those crossing multiple time zones — historically show measurable performance dips in their next game.