The Kraken will fly about 56,775 miles in the 2026-27 regular season, more than any other team. The Penguins fly 31,787, the least in the league. That is a gap of 24,988 miles, or 1.8 times as far.
Here is all 32, and then the part nobody publishes: whether any of it actually costs a team anything.
Distances are great-circle between arenas, counted in schedule order, including the flight home after the last game. Games played at neutral sites are counted where they are actually played.
Why does Seattle travel so much further than everyone else?
Two reasons, and they compound.
The first is geography. The Kraken are the most isolated team in the league — every road game is a real flight, and there is no equivalent of the bus ride between New York and Philadelphia to pad the schedule with cheap miles. The teams at the bottom of the table are clustered in the northeast, where a divisional road trip can be shorter than some teams' commute to practice.
The second is that they drew a trip to Europe. Their longest single leg is 4,765 miles, Seattle to Helsinki.
Which games are not played in an NHL arena?
Seven of the 1,344 games on the schedule are played somewhere other than an NHL arena: four in Europe and three outdoors.
These matter more than their number suggests. The European games are the single largest travel events on the calendar, and the four teams in them carry thousands of miles the rest of the league does not.
Does travel actually affect how teams play?
This is the question the mileage table is supposed to be answering, and the answer is no.
Here is every road game from the last two seasons, grouped by how many days since the team last played. This is the effect that is real:
A team playing the second night of a back-to-back on the road is 0.342 expected goals worse off than one that has had three days. That is a large, reliable, well-known effect.
Now hold rest fixed and vary the distance flown instead:
Nothing. The numbers wander up and down inside each column with no pattern, and the few cells that look alarming are the ones with the smallest samples. Across all 2,388 road games, once rest is accounted for, the correlation between miles flown and how a team plays is −0.012 — a t-statistic of −0.57, where anything under 2 means you are looking at noise.
The point estimate is −0.061 expected goals per extra 2,000 miles flown, but the honest version of that sentence is that the data cannot tell it apart from zero. The widest effect these 2,388 games can rule out is still under 0.3 expected goals per 2,000 miles, and the best guess sits almost exactly on nothing.
Professional teams fly charter, sleep on the plane, and have done this their whole careers. The jet lag is real for you and me. It does not show up in the hockey.
So what makes a schedule actually hard?
Rest, which the mileage table not only fails to capture but actively points the wrong way. Across the league, miles traveled and total back-to-backs correlate −0.41 — the teams that fly the most are scheduled fewer back-to-backs, presumably by design.
The Bruins play 13 road back-to-backs, the most in the league, while ranking 19th in miles. The Wild play 4. If you want one number for how punishing a team's calendar is, that is a better one than the distance flown, and it is not on any of the travel lists published every September — including, until this section, this one.
The compounding case is the last column: a back-to-back that follows a flight of 500 miles or more. The Kraken and Stars lead with seven each. That combination is the one worth circling, because the rest half of it is doing real work even though the flying half is not.
Frequently asked questions
Which NHL team travels the most in 2026-27?
The Kraken, at roughly 56,775 miles across the 84-game regular season. The Golden Knights (50,672) and Avalanche (50,590) are next. The Kraken also have the league's longest single flight of the season, 4,765 miles Seattle to Helsinki.
Which NHL team travels the least?
The Penguins, at about 31,787 miles — roughly 24,988 fewer than the league leader. The bottom of the table is almost entirely eastern teams, whose divisional road games are short hops.
Does travel distance affect NHL team performance?
Not measurably. Across 2,388 road games over two seasons, with days of rest held constant, the correlation between miles flown and expected-goal differential is −0.012, which is statistically indistinguishable from zero. Rest matters a great deal; distance does not.
What does affect a team on the road?
Days between games. Road teams on one day's rest post −0.404 expected goals, on two days −0.168, and on three days −0.062. That gradient is consistent, large, and knowable in advance from the schedule.
How many NHL games are played in Europe in 2026-27?
Four, plus three outdoor games in North America. The full list, with dates and venues, is in the table above.
How are these travel miles calculated?
Great-circle distance between arena locations, following each team's schedule in order, starting and ending at its own building, and counting neutral-site games at the venue where they are actually played. It is the distance flown, not the distance driven, and it does not model routing or layovers.
Where these numbers come from
The schedule is the league's published 2026-27 slate as it stands today, so the mileage figures move if games are relocated or made up. The performance half uses every regular-season road game from 2024-25 and 2025-26, with each team's expected goals for and against from our shot model.
If you want the schedule factors that do change outcomes, strength of schedule covers who each team plays and games per week and back-to-backs covers when. The 2026-27 schedule basics has the matchup structure, and the scores page has every game by date.