AS I SEE IT COLUMN: ‘But the travel…’ is a lame excuse for poor play

Whether it’s the Winnipeg Jets or any other professional sports franchise in any professional league, the idea that poor results are a product of a challenging schedule or lots of travel is pure bunk.

It’s meaningless and simply an attempt to distract from the poor play of whatever team needs an excuse.

Let’s unpack the ridiculous notion of travel hurting a team’s performance.

When you or I fly, we have to wait in long lines at the airport, whether we’re going through security or waiting in the lobby to board our plane.

Most pro teams charter planes (a handful have their own private jets). They don’t wait in lines for nearly as long as the general public does, and when they board the plane, it’s not packed like a sardine can like most public flights are these days. They have gobs of room to stretch and sleep if they have a long flight. They have an entire plane to themselves.

When they get to their destination, they don’t have waste time nor effort hailing a cab or finding a hotel room in their budget range. A luxury bus picks up the players and shuttles them directly to their five-star hotel. They sleep on the best mattresses money can buy and they don’t have to worry about paying for their luxury accommodations like many of us do. The team pays for all of it.

When most people travel, they have to book restaurants and figure out how much they want to spend on a meal. Not in the NHL. Every player gets a per diem of about $100 for food when they are on the road, whether or not the club pays for any team meals. How dreamy would your travel be if you got a healthy per diem and sometimes a free meal paid by someone else?

Yes, you read that correctly. NHLers, whose average salary is over $4 million a year (or $1,923 an hour when you break it down into an 40-hour work week), get paid a hundred bucks a day to eat. Keep in mind that the minimum wage in Manitoba is $15.80 an hour.

The real laugher about pathetically attempting to use travel as an excuse for poor play involves the tiny amount of time players actually spend “working.” The word ‘working’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence, as we’re talking about playing a game.

It is exceedingly rare for an NHL hockey player to play more than 30 minutes a game. In the real working world, people work seven to eight hours a day, five days a week.

Even if you factor in a game day skate, the players are “working” less than a couple of hours a day. Pretty dreamy, right?

And after practices and games, the players have constant access to massage therapists. How many of you have access to a free massage every day at work? How well would you sleep and how much of your stress would be gone with a daily massage?

Whenever teams complain about games every other night, the 800-pound elephant they never mention is they have every other day off.

Most working stiffs can only dream of working every other day. How well-rested would you be if you only worked every other day?

Plus, NHL players (especially teams like the Jets that don’t go far in the playoffs), have June, July, August and September to “rest up” for the coming work season. How many commoners have four months’ vacation to rest and relax? Keep in mind that on average during their four-month break, the NHLers are getting a cheque for at least $153,846 every two weeks during their long hiatus.

However you look at it – spending way less time at airports than the rest of us, staying in five-star hotels and eating at five-star restaurants, the few hours they actually work each day or week, having guys carry their equipment bags for them, having access to massages whenever they want, not having to worry about any costs for food and lodging – travel for a pampered NHLer is nothing compared to the travel stressors for regular folk.

In other words, it is beyond laughable for any professional sports team to use travel as an excuse for poor play.