One of the questions I have wanted to investigate has been the effect (if any) that travel distance/time has had when the St. Louis Blues have to travel for back-to-back games. When it comes to travel times, distances, and time zones, the Eastern Conference has had it relatively easy. Except for that Atlanta to Winnipeg thing, all their teams have been within the same time zone. The Blues and other central division teams have had to travel across two time zones. I'm not sure if it does affect the team and that is why I wanted to put together some of the data and take a look at the results.
Well Dirk Hoag (@Forechecker ) over at the Predators blog On the Forecheck puts together this data every year to provide an overview of the impact the schedule might have on a team. He posted this year's data a few days ago and wrote up his analysis of it. Even though it is a Predators' blog you should go give it a read.
So I took that table he made and turned it into a dataviz that you can use to explore the data season by season, team by season, with the ability to go view a team's schedule over at NHL.com.
As you can see, the Blues will be playing the fewest back-to-back games that they have in the past 2 full seasons. I already like this schedule for the Blues. Their travel distance is below their division's average and below their conference's average as well. When it comes to back-to-back games the Blues are at both their division and conference average for the 2013-2014 season. Not bad.
Play around with the visualization and you can see a team's trend of mileage and back-to-back games per season (charts at bottom) if you click on their name in the top chart. Or if you click on a team name in the middle chart it will take you to that team's schedule on NHL.com. This isn't hard hitting analysis that's going to predict the next Stanley Cup winner. But after all the #fancystat drama over the past couple of weeks, something light and fun is about right for this time of summer.