Delaware makes 24 G League road stops, Maine just 17

The Delaware Blue Coats play 24 road games this G League season and make 24 separate visits to play them. The Maine Celtics play the same 24 road games and make 17 visits.

That seven-visit gap is the widest in the league's new schedule, and it does not show up in the number most people check first. Count back-to-backs and Maine has 10, Delaware five. The club that looks busier on that count has the lighter road schedule.

Everything below is built from the published 2026-27 schedule for all 31 clubs as it stood on November 5, 2026. That is 744 games, and every club has exactly 48 of them. Games can move, so treat the counts as a snapshot.

Two phases, and the pairs

The season runs in two parts. The Tip-Off Tournament has every club playing 14 games, and the regular season adds 34 more.

Phase	Dates (US Eastern)	Games	Games per club	Two-game sets
Tip-Off Tournament	Nov 6 to Dec 16	217	14	32
Regular season	Dec 27 to Mar 27	527	34	70

A two-game set is the same two clubs in the same arena, with the second tip-off less than 30 hours after the first. There are 102 of them. They cover 204 of the 744 games, or 27.4%. The other 540 games are played on their own. There are no three-game sets.

Each club is home for 24 games and away for 24, with no exceptions. The schedule treats everyone equally on that count. The difference is how the 24 road games are arranged.

Counting stops

An away stop is one visit to an arena. Two road games in a set count as one stop, because the team stays put. A club that never plays a road set has 24 road games and 24 stops.

Stops are visits, not buildings. Clubs return to the same arenas on different dates, so Delaware's 24 stops take it to 11 different arenas and Maine's 17 take it to 13.

Across the 31 clubs the median is 21 stops and the mean is 20.7. The range is 17 to 24.

Club	Away games	Away stops	Away games in two-game sets	Back-to-backs
Delaware Blue Coats	24	24	0	5
Austin Spurs	24	23	2	3
Noblesville Boom	24	23	2	5
Iowa Wolves	24	19	10	11
Mexico City Capitanes	24	19	10	11
Laketown Squadron	24	19	10	10
Coachella Valley Lakers	24	19	10	9
Maine Celtics	24	17	14	10

The table shows the three clubs with the most stops and the five with the fewest. Maine has seven road sets, which is 14 of its 24 away games, and 10 single-game visits. Delaware has none of the former and all 24 of the latter.

Why back-to-backs mislead

We count a back-to-back when a club's two consecutive tip-offs are less than 30 hours apart. By that measure the league has 236 team back-to-backs across the season. The count runs from three (Austin) to 12 (Greensboro), with a median of seven.

In the NBA a back-to-back usually means a flight between nights. Here it almost never does. Of the 236, 234 are played in the same arena on both nights. Only two involve a change of building, and they belong to Long Island and Stockton, one each.

Most of them are the sets above, seen from both sides: 102 for the home club hosting the set, 102 for the visitor playing it. A further 30 are a host playing two different visitors on consecutive nights.

So a high back-to-back count here mostly means a club has been given sets, and sets are how a schedule cuts the number of trips. The two measures run in opposite directions:

• The eight clubs with 10 or more back-to-backs (Greensboro, Iowa, Sioux Falls, Mexico City, San Diego, Laketown, Maine and Wisconsin) all make 20 or fewer stops.
• The seven clubs with five or fewer (Austin, College Park, Delaware, Noblesville, Grand Rapids, Westchester and Stockton) all make 21 or more.

What the numbers show, and what we read into them

The numbers show a spread of seven stops between the lightest and heaviest road lists, and an inverse link between back-to-backs and stops. Both follow directly from the schedule.

What they mean is our reading, and we have not measured it. The schedule does not explain itself, and we did not compute mileage or check whether teams fly or ride a bus. The pattern is consistent with sets being placed where trips are longest. Mexico City is the obvious case, with 10 of 24 away games in sets. Delaware, Long Island and Westchester sit in the same corner of the country, where a single-game trip is a short one, and they make 24, 22 and 21 stops. That is a plausible story. It is not proven by a count of arenas.

A distance measure would settle it, and so would results. If a club's road record shifts with its number of stops, the schedule matters on the floor as well as in the travel budget. Nothing has been played yet, so that check waits until there are games to count.

For now the useful habit is simple: when a G League schedule is described as light or heavy, ask how many separate visits the club has to make, not how many nights it plays on consecutive days.

The same schedule has more to say. We looked at how the Tip-Off Tournament stays inside the divisions, at the uneven December break, and at how many games each club packs into short windows.

For a contrast from another league, Brazil's NBB schedules no back-to-backs at all in its first turn, and neither does Australia's NBL.