Skip to main content

A deeper look at the NHL schedule

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.

Popular posts from this blog

Cheer up, it's the holidays...

Why is it that various media outlets continue trying to put their own spin on the "what's wrong with the NHL" story? Our latest example comes from The Hockey News , in a piece by Jay Greenburg entitled, "Excitement Level On The Decline." Take the opening sentence: Attendance is down and yet still up from before the lockout, leaving it arguable whether buildings in New Jersey and Florida are half-full or half empty. It's no surprise that attendance is down from last season, particularly if you compare the first half of 2005-06 to the first half of this year. Coming out of the lockout, there were legions of fans starved to see the on-ice product, particularly in light of the massive rule changes. This year is more indicative of business as usual, so the fact that the league is above pre-lockout levels is a positive. Toss in the projection that overall revenues are increasing despite a 1% decrease in attendance, and I'd say that paying fans have come back

How I'm Trying To Make Money Sports Blogging

To kick off this series of articles general sports-blogging articles here at OTF Classic, I think it's best to start with a comment that Brad left here last week, after I shared my goals for 2012 , which include specific revenue targets: I considered diving into the world of internet marketing myself, but I felt that my friends would hate me for bugging them about stuff. I mean, it's pretty low-risk high-reward, so it's tempting. I wouldn't mind reading about tips on how to maximize impact of blogging in general to make it a legitimate income source. Trying to make money at sports blogging can be a very touchy subject - for the vast majority of us, this is an activity we pursue to both exercise our creativity and share our love of the game, whether it's hockey, football, badminton, whatever, with fellow fans. Mixing that personal conversation with a commercial message can turn people off, especially if it becomes too intrusive for the reader. It's not unrea

Social Media, Internet Marketing, and Real, Paying Customers - it really works!

Applying the basic tenets of internet marketing (SEO best practices and social media network building) have helped me grow the readership and engagement over at On The Forecheck tremendously in recent years, but lately I've been wondering if those same techniques could be applied to small- or medium-sized local businesses, to help them drive real, tangible business results. I'm talking about not just drawing idle hockey fans looking to a blog so they can muse over line combinations, but helping businesses connect with potential customers in ways that otherwise wouldn't occur. Recently, I was able to help make just such a thing happen, and it shows just how great the opportunities are for small, local businesses which may not have the resources or skills available to extend their brand effectively on the internet.