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Between Feb. 25 and March 11 (14 days), the Golden State Warriors traveled 9,446 miles -- roughly 17 percent of their total travel his season. 

Between Jan. 6 and Feb. 2 (27 days), the Rockets traveled 12,415 miles -- just over 24 percent of their total travel this season. 

The Nuggets had traveled 33 percent of their total travel this year by Dec. 15.

Other teams have endured hellish stretches as well, like the Hornets’ December, the Thunder’s January and the Wizards’ March. (Schedule data via Nylon Calculus)

Every NBA season is going to have rough patches, brutal stretches. But this season, they’ve been extreme. The boiling point came Friday night, as Warriors coach Steve Kerr, after his team had played eight games in 13 days and traveled almost 10,000 miles, announced after a loss to the Timberwolves that he would rest Stephen Curry, Klay Thompson and Draymond Green on Saturday. That night, the Warriors were scheduled for their third back-to-back of this stretch, and it just happened to come against the San Antonio Spurs on national television. The league’s two best teams would already be without Kawhi Leonard (concussion), LaMarcus Aldridge (heart arrhythmia), Kevin Durant (knee) and Tony Parker (back) in their first matchup since opening night. 

But this wasn’t injury, it was rest, and when you look at the schedule, it’s hard to blame Kerr for making that call. And the Warriors coach was understandably annoyed to make it. From ESPN:

“It’s truly insane,” Kerr said on Thursday on 95.7 The Game. “This is the worst stretch of schedule that I’ve ever been a part of and I’ve been in the league since 1988. I’ve never seen anything like this, eight games in eight cities with 11,000 miles.”

...

But Adam Silver has resisted fining teams for similar decisions. Kerr applauds Silver for his openness to this difficult topic. The league has agreed to stretch the season seven to ten days in 2017-18 and cut down on preseason games in addition to cutting down back-to-backs.

“What I really respect about Adam Silver is he’s been really proactive about trying to deal with this issue. He’s all ears when we talk to him.”

Kerr personally brought up this March stretch in a conversation with Silver this summer. What was Silver’s response? Kerr said Silver promised he’s working on it and the league was “going to do everything we can to lighten the load.”

“And I believe him.”

via Science and brutal travel led Kerr to rest stars. 

What’s interesting, of course, is that these road trips come after the league has already made efforts to shift the schedule. This season, back-to-backs are down. The NBA reduced the number of four-games-in-five-nights instances from 70 last season to just 27.

We’ve seen the fruits of those efforts. Scoring is up, and the night-by-night performances statistically are ridiculous. Offensive efficiency is up 2.2 points per 100 possessions to 106.1. Four teams have an offensive efficiency above 110 (last season only Golden State hit above that mark). It stands to reason that players having more rest leads to better energy and better efficiency.

But there’s a cost to those changes. And one thing we’ve seen is the uptick in these crazy, drawn-out road trips. It’s not just the miles, it’s the frequency of games. 

Hornets coach Steve Clifford notes one of the challenges, especially for a team that’s struggling, is the inability to find practice time to rectify issues. 

“You get less practice days,” Clifford said last week in Denver. “Before, I didn’t like all the back-to-backs, either. The thing I’d say about the back-to-backs is -- and I don’t think they’ll ever go back to it -- but I think it’d be better if everyone played relatively the same number, which has never been the case. But even with reducing them, on these road trips, you don’t get the practice days, you don’t get two days between games.

“Now what we do in practice is less contact, more rest, and there are drawbacks to that, obviously.”

Saturday’s game between the Warriors and Spurs was never going to be as good as it should be, due to injuries to Leonard and Durant that couldn’t have been avoided. But it became an absolute joke when the Warriors made the wise decision to punt on playing their other three stars. This game has huge implications for the No. 1 seed and home court in the playoffs, but the schedule has created a situation where Golden State had no choice but to essentially punt the game, even if its chances remain good due to the Spurs’ injury situation. And yet it’s basically a preseason game, talent wise. 

It’s not just this game that’s suffering, either. The Warriors have lost four of six. The Cavaliers have lost four of five. The Celtics have lost three of four. Getting down to it, the elephant in the room is 82 games. It’s too long, and everyone knows it. The season would be better at between 58 and 70 games. Everyone knows that, it’s no secret. But that would mean the owners, players and coaches would have to give up money ... and that’s not happening, ever. It’s a non-starter. The minute the league adopted 82 games, decades ago, it ensured we were going to have this problem. The only real solution is to expand the league to going from September through all of July, erasing all but a month of the offseason, which isn’t a really viable situation, either. 

Next season, the NBA is set to draw the schedule back to mid-October, shortening the preseason and giving more room to spread games out. Long road trips will likely still be a regular part of NBA life, and the schedule will always be harder on some teams than others. But much of this reveals the complicated nature that is inherent to the schedule, between not only the league’s 82-game format and typical time span, but also arena issues like concerts and other events. 

One last thing the NBA should probably be aware of is how often these late-season marquee matchups get spoiled. The NBA saves most of its key games for March and April. Golden State and San Antonio play twice in 18 days, after not playing once since the opening night of the season. The league does this because between September and February, the sports world belongs to football, and the NFL in particular. They want playoff-relevant matchups late in the season, building momentum of interest for the playoffs. Spring, after all, is the NBA’s golden time. 

But late season is also when teams rest more commonly. You saw an uptick of injuries in February after the league was relatively free of them up until then. Teams are resting more and more, and many of these matchups will be without key players. It’s only sensible if you’re a playoff team firmly in command of your seeding, or between a few spots you’re comfortable with. If the NBA wants its best teams facing one another at full strength, repositioning some of these matchups to the winter would make sense. You still can’t control for injuries, though, and if two juggernauts play and everyone’s watching the Cowboys play the Jaguars anyway, did it happen?

There are no good answers to these issues, and the league doesn’t want to put its teams in this position. Some things can’t be avoided, and in fairness, no one’s complaining about the billions of dollars in revenue the TV networks have provided the league, which has gone to teams and players. But if we’re going to value championships first, and everything else second, teams are going to have to make these kinds of choices, even if the results mean that Saturday’s marquee matchup is between Pau Gasol and Patrick McCaw.