Geography and Sports

I saw this mentioned on Reddit earlier last week, and it’s interesting to think about. It’s pretty obvious that geography plays a strong role in sports: how games and events are scheduled depends on where they are taking place and what needs to happen to get the participants there. Here’s an interesting article about one unique problem: the NBA had to change its approach to scheduling games in Denver because of (a) how distant that city is from pretty much everywhere (the closest city to Denver with a big-four sports team is Oklahoma City, at nearly 500 miles away), and (b) how far Denver’s airport is from the city proper (over 20 miles from downtown Denver). And there’s the other factor of Denver’s elevation to account for; teams in Denver have a built-in advantage. (Not that it’s helped the Rockies this year, obviously.)

That’s just one venue with one NBA team. This is the kind of thing that sport schedulers have to think about, everywhere. Fascinating stuff, the machinations behind the games that we all end up watching.

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