Travel in the NHL is gruelling – but it doesn’t have to be

Imagine if your job required you to fly thousands of miles every year, check in and out of different hotels on almost a nightly basis when travelling, change between a suit and your protective gear multiple times per day, risk your bones, joints and all your teeth each time you take a shift and face constant criticism for your work and your life from a legion of people you have never met.

Doesn’t sound very glamorous, does it?! Welcome to the NHL!

OK, a lot of that is very much tongue-in-cheek and I am not suggesting we need to play tiny violins for NHL players. They get paid extremely well to play a sport they love. They get summers off. They stay in the finest hotels. They get to go to work with a bunch of their buddies. And they are cheered by fans in full arenas and living rooms across the continent. It’s a gig for which most people would trade their own jobs in a heartbeat. But there’s no denying it’s a much harder life than people think. Especially when it comes to travel.

Players spend 50 percent of their seasons on the road. For starters, it’s a long time to be away from their homes and loved ones. In addition, it can be a taxing daily grind of routine. While there is an occasional day off in a favorite city or a team bonding dinner / event on the road that can break up the work, most of the time is spent following a rigid schedule. A player’s game day on the road probably looks like this: get up, put a suit on, eat breakfast, get on the bus, travel to the rink for morning skate, get treatment for nagging injuries, get hockey gear on, get a quick sweat on the ice, get back in a suit, get back on the bus, go back to the hotel, eat lunch, change out of the suit, unwind or take a nap, put the suit back on, get back on the bus, travel back to the rink, put the gear back on, play a game, do media, put the suit back on, get back on the bus, travel to the airport, fly to a new city, eat dinner on the plane, get back on the bus, travel to the hotel, early morning check in, sleep, wake up. Do it all over again.

The clothing and equipment changes alone are gruelling! Anyone that has ever put on hockey equipment knows that it is quite a process. Imagine doing it more than 200 times in a seven month span. Eighty-two games plus preseason, probably close to as many morning skates and another 30-40 practices, plus training camp. Wax on, wax off. Even the things you love can become repetitive and hard to get up for.

Travel for a NHL player is as pain-free as it can possibly be, with business-class charter planes, private landing strips and five-star hotels, but it’s still travel. A late night post-game flight across multiple time zones, followed by a bus transfer to the next hotel, can leave even a finely tuned athlete feeling drained. If the airport is far from the team hotel, as it is in places like Denver and Edmonton, that bus ride after a long flight can be a killer.

It’s no secret that teams from certain regions are at a disadvantage from a travel perspective. Teams in the northeast cluster can play a lot of their games either by driving or taking a very short flight, while teams from the west, Midwest, south and southeast spend a lot more time in the air. Over the course of a season, all of that extra mileage has an impact on player health and fatigue levels. And sometimes, that translates to wins and losses.

There is a solution that would lessen the physical toll on players, reduce team charter expenses, eliminate most back-to-back games following travel and leave less of an environmental impact on the world, but so far, the NHL hasn’t been willing to adopt it. I’m referring to a baseball-style mini-series schedule format, where teams would play multiple games in a city instead of returning to that city on separate occasions throughout the season.

This format worked out of necessity during the shortened 2020-21 season. In an effort to minimize the COVID-19 risk and address the closure of the U.S.-Canada border, teams played regular seasons confined to specific divisions and played three or four game sets against the same opponent.

I am not suggesting we return to a schedule segregated by division like that, or even by conference the way it was in the early 2000s. I understand that NHL players, owners and fans want to have every other team in the league pass through their team’s building over the course of a season. We shouldn’t return to the days when, for example, a west-coast team’s fan base went an entire season without seeing stars like Sidney Crosby, Alex Ovechkin or Steven Stamkos.

That said, do we need multiple journeys by a team to another city when one trip would suffice? Do we need to have a schedule that sees, for example, Edmonton flying to Arizona, Chicago to Seattle, Carolina to Ottawa or Dallas to Vancouver more than once per season? I don’t think so. Those teams could easily spend three nights in a city to play two games. Or stay four or five nights to play three games. You get the idea. There would be fewer travel days overall, more flex in the schedule to reduce back-to-backs and fewer logistics for everyone involved. Players might actually wake up remembering which city they were in.

There have been proponents of this schedule format around the league, including several general managers, and the idea was raised again while the 2021-22 schedule process was unfolding. Unfortunately, the league was reluctant to try it, which perhaps suggests those opposed to the idea around the league carried a stronger voice. The counter-argument is apparently the notion that it is too hard for teams to sell tickets to see the same opponent on consecutive game nights.

I don’t buy it. Other than season ticket holders, the same people aren’t purchasing tickets to consecutive games anyway. And multiple games in succession against the same opponent has the potential to breed hostility and drama – the type of hostility and drama that sells tickets.

To me, the benefits of the baseball-style schedule format far outweigh the potential ticket sales challenges. I’m in favor of travel savings for teams, more competitive balance, more environmental responsibility, and above all, a less gruelling travel schedule for the athletes that make this game great.

I’ll put away my soapbox and my tiny violin now.

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Chris Gear joined Daily Faceoff in January after a 12-year run with the Vancouver Canucks, most recently as the club’s Assistant General Manager and Chief Legal Officer. Before migrating over to the hockey operations department, where his responsibilities included contract negotiations, CBA compliance, assisting with roster and salary cap management and governance for the AHL franchise, Gear was the Canucks’ vice president and general counsel.

Click here to read Gear’s other Daily Faceoff stories.

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Travel in the NHL is gruelling – but it doesn’t have to be

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