Also, if we do really have 5/7 and 6/9 on the road to start and end the season, and have two different 6 game road trips, that means that we get 23 of our 41 road games out of the way in 4 chunks. That is actually really good, and would indicate that we have long stretches at home.
To me, the killer last year was not the long road trips, but rather, the lack of long home stands where we didn't have to travel. Every team has long road trips. Those can actually be good bonding experiences for the team and we tend to play well on long road trips. But January and February were brutal because we never had any long homestands to balance it out. We'd have something like 4 on the road, 1 at home, 2 on the road, 2 at home, 3 on the road, 1 at home, 1 on the road. It was the inability to ever get a long homestand for like 2-3 months of the season that was a killer. I recall Kayte saying on one broadcast that we had played something like 20 of our previous 24 games in a different city than the previous game. That is crazy! That constant travelling (even with home games sprinkled in) is much harder than long road trip followed by long home stand.
Hopefully having those 4 really long road trips will mean longer home stands.