Gran Canaria's travel distance is almost twice as big as of NBA teams / News - Basketnews.com

NBA teams traveled an average of 41,000 miles (~66,000 km) during the 2022-23 regular season while Gran Canaria accumulated more than 121,000 km. The team often chooses to stay in the first destination of the week and travel to the next game from there so they don't have to travel back and forth.

Credit: Euroleague Basketball via Getty Images Credit Euroleague Basketball via Getty Images

Dreamland Gran Canaria's geographical situation is arguably the most difficult of all the basketball organizations in entire Europe. The team's travel distance this year reveals numbers that are hard to fathom even for NBA clubs.

Herbalife Gran Canaria Las Palmas / Schedule

BAXI Manresa Herbalife Gran Canaria Las Palmas105-75 Real Madrid Herbalife Gran Canaria Las PalmasSun10:30 Herbalife Gran Canaria Las Palmas Real MadridWed19:00

With the league striving to decrease the distances every year, NBA teams traveled an average of 41,000 miles (~66,000 km) during the 2022-23 regular season, which is an all-time low. Gran Canaria almost doubles this number this year.

According to Nacho Duque from Marca, the Spanish club accumulated more than 121,000 km in travel distance throughout the season.

Located several thousand kilometers away from mainland Spain, Gran Canaria do not travel with charter planes. Instead, they use regular airlines for travel to and from the games.

"The season is hard because Gran Canaria is where it is. We traveled a lot. There were very hard trips. We have covered the most kilometers traveled by all the teams in the world, including the NBA," the team's head coach Jaka Lakovic has said during the season.

The team quite often chooses to stay in the first destination of the week and travel to the next match from there so they don't have to travel back and forth to the home islands. As such, there have been numerous unusual stories involving the team's travels, Duque notes.

Throughout the years, the players had to travel in batches because there weren't enough seats on the plane. When he still played for Gran Canaria, current Real Madrid superstar center Edy Tavares had to lie down during takeoff because he couldn't fit into a seat until a passenger let him sit in the emergency row where there's more space, the journalist writes.

Gran Canaria recently won the EuroCup and earned themselves a chance to play in next year's EuroLeague. However, the organization has been hesitant to join the top European club competition with one of the reasons being travelling difficulties.

"Valencia Basket went from half a million in travel expenses for the EuroCup to 1.5 million for the EuroLeague. We are in the Canary Islands, we live in Africa, and we know that the travel budget would rise to more than a million," the club's president Sitapha Savane said.

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