On April 6th, the Portland Trail Blazers flew across the country to play a game in Brooklyn. Usually NBA road trips contain several games spread over a (somewhat) travel optimized route, but Portland flew right back home after facing the Nets rs gold to play the Timberwolves on the 8th.

The April 6th game was a makeup for a weather postponed game1 and the lengthy distance Portland traveled to play this one game quickly sparked discussion on Twitter about how much the distance a team travels to play a game matters. The idea was simple: If a team travels further to play a game, they may be slightly more likely to lose. Makes sense.

To look into this problem, I used game logs from Basketball-Reference and googled the coordinates of each team’s home stadium since the 1985-1986 season. With a location of every stadium, I was then able to calculate the distance in miles for every possible trip on the NBA schedule, and calculate the (straight-line) distance each team traveled to get to the game they were about to play. I Further assumed they were coming directly from the location of last game. I calculated this per-game distance for both the home and away team for every game of every regular season since 1985-86.

The relationship between the distance a team travels to a game and a game’s result is murky at best. For the sake of the analysis, I skipped game logs of the Hornets team that split its home games between Oklahoma City and New Orleans for one season, and filtered out game logs that were among the first 20 games a team played2.

 Splitting my data into ten and nine season timespans left between eight and nine thousand games to be analyzed for each timespan. www.rsfarmer.com I evaluated the effect the distance traveled has on a game’s result by making logistic regression models utilizing variables such as the Home Team’s Distance Traveled, the Visiting Team’s Distance Traveled, the Distance the Home Team has traveled for its last 5 games, and the Distance the Visiting Team has traveled for its last 5 games to predict whether or not the home team won the game.