SUSTAINABILITY STRATEGIES
How the NBA is tackling basketball’ s travel problem Perhaps most significantly, the league has started to address one of professional sport’ s most challenging environmental issues: travel.
As things stand, NBA teams collectively travel 1.3 million air miles during a regular season, which generates a great deal of greenhouse gas emissions.
The league has responded by restructuring schedules to reduce unnecessary journeys, ensuring teams play both Los Angeles franchises or both New York teams during single trips, rather than criss-crossing the country multiple times.
The jet-setting of the players only makes up around 5 % of the NBA’ s travel related emissions, though, with the rest coming from fan travel.
“ The biggest ecological impact of running events is actually the fan travel. That can be anywhere between 65 % and 80 % of the carbon footprint of the event industry,” says Justin Zeulner, Founder of the Wave Foundation.
The NBA understands this and has looked into the ways that it can cut the travel emissions of supporters. For the 2024 All- Star Game in Indianapolis, for instance, the league provided free public transport to and from the arena, which prevented a huge amount of individual car journeys.
92 January 2026