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Comment by chiefalchemist | Hacker News Reader

> "WHEN IT COMES to the toll of travel, the NBA is in a league all its own. NBA teams, according to ESPN Stats & Information's Vincent Johnson, average 43,534 miles per season, nearly 7 percent more than..."

Not to get too far off topic but couldn't it be possible for the NBA (or any league) to optimize for this?

Along the same lines, I have to wonder if there's a way to incorporate such signals into a betting algorithm. That is, once you get past home team advantage, perhaps stops / miles in the previous week is worth +/- X points.

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I would guess player travel is a bit low in the schedule makers priorities. They have a lot to account for with arena availability as they often share with concerts/events and even a handful share with professional NHL teams and their own 40+ home game schedules.

The NBA optimizes for this somewhat. Many east coast teams will play all three Texas based teams in a single trip. There are a lot of factors that can get in the way of this, such as concerts, trade shows, or other large events that are booked in large arenas.

For instance, the Spurs are forced to go on 22 day road trip because their home arena is busy hosting the annual San Antonio Stock and Rodeo Show.

There is also a lot of data on team win/loss percentages that I'm sure vegas keeps up on. On average - teams on the 2nd game of a back to back road trip win just 32% of their contests. Also, teams that play one game at home and another on the road the following night only win 37.3% of their contests.

"teams on the 2nd game of a back to back road trip win just 32% of their contests"

Well, ok, but since there is presumably an overall home court advantage, 32% (or 37%) isn't in comparison to a baseline of 50%, but something less. I found a page that suggests the median NBA team wins a little under 40% of its road games. There are teams that do fairly good at home that average around 33% on the road.

I'd also guess that east/west miles traveled are more of a disadvantage than north/south miles. Flying sucks, but messing with your circadian sucks even more.

The league also semi-optimizes for this with divisions/conferences.

If you need extreme data points you should look into the Russian Premier League for Football. While sports in the USA use Eastern/Western Conferences to lower travel requirements, the Football leagues enforces 2 matches per teams regardless of location. In the 2017-2018 season the farthest two teams were 5,000+ miles apart! [1]

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017%E2%80%9318_Russian_Premie...

True wrt the distance, but in the RPL there is less than one league match per week per team, whereas each NBA team plays around 3.5 games per week.

They do. It's rare that there are games across region on close nights. Road trips are usually to a specific region, then the team plays at home a bit.

As others have mentioned, the league optimizes for this somewhat. For instance: East Coast teams often go on a West Coast road trip where they will play in Denver, LA, Portland, Utah, etc. for a stretch. Also, often times West Coast teams play in Brooklyn (Nets) and Manhattan (Knicks) in a short period of time.

Not sure what you mean by optimize, but MLB teams often play several games against each other in a row.

But that’s slightly different because it could be seen to change the dynamic form performance over a season to fewer best out of N events.

Baseball is a bit different because they play 2x as many games per season,so they need to bundle up.

They don’t need to, but they have found it to be more… optimal.

> Along the same lines, I have to wonder if there's a way to incorporate such signals into a betting algorithm

That is already done. Vegas accounts for every conceivable variable under the sun.

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