How much does your NHL team travel?

Time flies when one is being lazy! I saw this article a few weeks ago but never blogged it!

Here it is - Dirk Hoag made an awesome table calculating the miles traveled by each NHL team in the 2009/2010 season comparing to their 2008/2009 season. This info can be directly used to update the NHLPA carbon neutral challenge blog where I estimated the amount of carbon emission per Vancouver Canucks player…  it’ll be discussed later.

First, some interesting facts from Dirk Hoag’s article!

• Calgary Flames travels the most - 55,331 miles (89,047km)
• Buffalo Sabres travels the least - 25,991 miles (41,828 km), 47% of Calgary!
• Average - 40,782 miles (65,632 km)
• Vancouver Canucks is ranked 4th in the most distance traveled (48,221 miles or 77,604 km) after Phoenix Coyotes, Dallas Stars, and Calgary Flames
• San Jose Sharks reduced their travel the most by 9,696 miles (15,604km) in 2009/2010!

OK, we know that for each player to participate in the NHLPA carbon neutral challenge, each of them pays $320 to purchase 10-tonnes of Carbon. In my NHLPA carbon neutral challenge article, I estimated that the total travel distance for a Canuck player is 60,000km producing 14 tonnes of carbon dioxide (200g CO2-equivalent per km traveled by air). According to this new info, everyone in the Vancouver Canucks hockey club produces 15.5 tonnes of CO2 per year, which means Canucks players should buy more carbon credits =). I would calculate the actual carbon credits to be purchased by every team in the league, but many teams actually travels by car to some of the games and the carbon emission is different. If and when I find those info, I’d be happy to prepare a table so that players and staff, if interested, can pay appropriate amount of carbon offsets to be truely “carbon neutral”.

What do you think?