Huge discrepancies in travel for NHL teams next season.

Over the last little while the topic of competitive integrity has become a hot button issue in the National Hockey League. As of late this topic has usually centered around the advantage that teams in states with no state tax have over their competitors, but that is hardly the only competitive discrepancy that impacts teams around the league.

Recently Thomas Nestico, who can be found @tjstats on X, took the time to break down how each team in the NHL will be impacted by their travel schedules come next season.

Now I'm sure that any of us who have traveled by plane before would agree that, more travel can and will directly lead to increased fatigue and things like jet lag and by extension surely that means that teams with less travel will be more well rested throughout the season and as such will benefit from a competitive advantage. Well in some cases the discrepancies in travel is truly massive, with the Dallas Stars (the team that will travel the most next season) for example having to travel nearly twice as much as the Pittsburgh Penguins (the team that will travel the least next season.)

As far as I know there is no way to truly measure just how much of an advantage this will prove to be for teams on the bottom of the list or how much of a disadvantage it will be for teams near the top. I'll let you be the judge of that yourselves, but you can see the full breakdown of how much every NHL team will travel compared to their opponents in the image below courtesy of Thomas Nestico.