The Utah Jazz surprised us all with their unexpected reveal of the Seattle Kraken’s Winter Classic Jersey on Nov. 17. This got me thinking about an NBA team inevitably returning to Seattle and what it might mean for the Kraken. More specifically, I’ve been pondering since that jersey reveal about how adding an NBA team to Climate Pledge Arena would impact the Kraken home schedule. Now that the hoopla of the Winter Classic has died down, I decided to do some investigating to see how other NHL teams’ schedules get impacted by sharing their buildings with NBA teams.
My expectation was that teams that share an arena with the NBA would have more mid-week games and fewer weekend games. In fact, the data does support that but does not have nearly the influence I would have guessed. The larger ramifications are on the specific day of the week the game is played and the number of day games.
Process
I analyzed 20 NHL team schedules—10 NHL teams that share an arena with the NBA and 10 that only house the NHL—from 2014-2024 and excluded the two seasons (2019-20, 2020-21) that were shortened due to the pandemic.
During the eight seasons researched, 328 regular-season home games were played per team with the exception of the Detroit Red Wings (205 games), who only started sharing with the Detroit Pistons in the 2017-18 season when Little Caesars Arena opened. For “NBA + NHL” cities, 3,157 regular-season home NHL games were analyzed. For “NHL Only” teams, 3,280 regular-season games were analyzed.
NBA + NHL
Currently there are 10 NHL teams that share an arena with an NBA team:
- Los Angeles Kings
- Dallas Stars
- Colorado Avalanche
- Washington Capitals
- Detroit Red Wings
- New York Rangers
- Toronto Maple Leafs
- Boston Bruins
- Chicago Blackhawks
- Philadelphia Flyers
One team of note is the Los Angeles Kings who share Crypto.com Arena with both the Clippers and Lakers. Interestingly, five of the “Original Six” NHL team arenas also play home to NBA teams. From a divisional standpoint, there are three teams each from the Atlantic, Metropolitan, and Central Divisions that house teams from both leagues and just one team in the Pacific Division.
NHL Only
I compared the “NBA + NHL” teams with 10 NHL teams that have their own barn, and the “NHL Only” teams used are:
- San Jose Sharks
- Vancouver Canucks
- Montreal Canadiens
- Buffalo Sabres
- Carolina Hurricanes
- Tampa Bay Lightning
- New Jersey Devils
- Pittsburgh Penguins
- Nashville Predators
- Minnesota Wild
Results
Data is sliced into a few views:
- Sunday-Thursday versus Friday-Saturday
- Days of the week
- Day games versus night games
- Comparison to the Seattle Kraken
Sunday-Thursday versus Friday-Saturday
As seen in the graphs, the difference between “NBA + NHL” and “NHL Only” for weekend games is only 2.6 percent. That works out to roughly one fewer weekend game each year for teams that share an arena.
Days of the week
What jumped out here is “NHL Only” teams played 68.2 percent of their homes games on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays compared to “NBA + NHL” teams played only 59.9 percent. By far these three days of the week are the busiest in the NHL.
For “NBA + NHL” teams, the remaining days of the week were more level with approximately 10 percent of the games each day, with Friday being the lowest at 8.6 percent. For the “NHL Only” teams, Wednesday was the least active day at 5.7 percent with Monday, Friday and Sunday coming in around a nine-percent average.
Day games versus night games
Teams that share arenas have to deal with converting the venue from hockey to basketball and back, which is the reason I looked at the data for day games. The LA Times reported, “… a group of 60 Crypto.com Arena workers set in motion a two-hour transformation of the playing surfaces, from Clippers hardwood to Kings ice, and for only a handful of times, back to hardwood for a Lakers game the following day.” Here is a video of the process to convert between basketball and hockey.
For reference, a day game is any game starting before 3:00 p.m. and a night game is 3:00 p.m. or later. The main takeaway is that “NBA + NHL” teams had 3.5 percent more day games than “NHL Only”.
The number of day games per team varied by a large margin. For the “NBA + NHL” teams, the range varied from 0.9 percent to 18.9 percent. For “NHL Only” teams the range varied from 0.6 percent to 14 percent. That seems somewhat like team preference was a deciding factor on if teams played day games or not, but in general Seattle might expect a couple more day games during the year if they end up with an NBA team sharing CPA.
Comparison to the Seattle Kraken
Through the first three seasons of hockey in Seattle, the Kraken are right in the middle between “NHL Only” and “NBA + NHL” teams with 33.3 percent of their games scheduled on the weekend. The Kraken have evenly distributed their remaining games over the other days of the week (Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday). Seattle has had six scheduled day games over the first three years which is 4.9 percent of their home games.
Overall
I agree that the NBA will come back to Seattle. “I think the NBA comes someday, and I think the NBA fans owe the Kraken fans a beer and a tip of the cap,” Kraken CEO Tod Leiweke told KOMO News on Jan. 4, 2023.
Kraken fans can rest easy, though, as the data supports that the NHL home schedule will not change drastically. There could be a few more day games and one fewer weekend game, but overall, we should continue to enjoy a similar schedule composition.
It would be interesting to see what the home and road blocks look like. Instinctively it seems like teams who share an arena would have home and road blocks with more games, so that when one team is on the road, the other team can have a home stretch. This avoids constantly having to change the arena set-up so is likely more cost-efficient for teams.
I did not focus on that during this exercise, but when the Kraken won every game during a 7 game road trip last year, I did look at how common 7 game road trips are. Over the past 10 seasons (as of last year) about 20% of the teams have a 7 game road trip each year.
Looking back at my data from before there were 36 teams that had road trips of 7 games or more between 2012-2023. Only ten of those instances were for teams that also host an NBA team. 10/36 or ~28%.
My only concern here would be the transition from home to road series and vice versa, i.e. would the Kraken lose days’ of rest by going to/from Seattle (an NBA and NHL city) to an NHL only city. I would hope that the Kraken would have priority since the NHL prioritized Seattle and thus made the Kraken the primary tenant at Climate Pledge, whereas that petty, vindictive little imp Dave Stern decided to let the Sonics leave because the state legislature didn’t didn’t kiss his ring. And if prioritizing the Kraken over the latest iteration of the Sonics, well then tough. If NBA has a problem with that they can file it under “load management”
That is an interesting thought on days rest. I did not pull road schedule data, but spot checked a handful of teams and the average days rest transitioning to/from a road trip was ~2.3 days. I looked at LA Kings (2.0), Dallas (2.5), San Jose (2.2) and Seattle (2.6). LA might of been a bad team to compare against as they have 2 NBA teams, so lowest makes sense. Also the number of road trips varied regardless of NBA team or not. LA had 12 road trips and Dallas had 18. Both LA and Dallas are NBA + NHL cities, with San Jose and Seattle being NHL Only.
Just a note that although the Hurricanes do not share the arena with an NBA team, they do share it with NC State men’s basketball, and the ACC Conference is actually *harder* to deal with than the NBA in terms of scheduling. From Dec. thru Feb., the Canes are prevented from scheduling Saturday nights and Sunday afternoons by the ACC.