Home Court Advantage

I love football and its playoff format especially now that its Playoff OT rules have finally been changed, 10 years too late, but there's beauty in a playoff series, like in the NHL, NBA, and MLB. What makes playoff series so amazing is that in order to have a winner, there has to be an odd number of games (yay for algebra arithmetic) EDIT: and the lower seed gets to play at least one game at home. This automatically creates home field/court advantage EDIT: for both teams, this mysterious, somewhat immeasurable force, and here at WMBC, we love non-tangible factors. But is it a factor?

Edits courtesy of some restless guy from some town.

Don't know if you caught it or not last night, but in Game 1 of the NBA Finals last night, the LA Lakers gave the Boston Celtics a bit of an arse whoopin'. It's easy to look at the stats after the fact (+10 differential on rebounds, Celtics shooting 1-10 from 3, Lakers having more steals, blocks, and less turnovers), but box scores are boring. Was there some sort of force that caused the Celtics to just be outplayed last night?

To test the power of home court advantage during the Finals, I looked at how the Finals have played out from 2000-2009. Let's check some numbers out:

The previous 10 years seemed plenty enough data for analysis of how this power, if even there, would effect affect influence today's players (damn you, grammar).

First, let's start with the easiest statistic to measure, total NBA Finals championships won by the home team/higher seed and the away team/lower seed:

Home Team/Higher Seed NBA Finals Champions: 8
Away Team/Lower Seed NBA Finals Champions: 2

Pretty telling NBA Finals Championship discrepency between the team with home court advantage (80%) and the team without it (20%). Let's dig a little deeper.

Let's see, in general, irregardless of whether the team was the higher seed or lower seed, how the team playing at home faired:

Total NBA Finals Games: 54
Total Won While Playing At Home: 35
Total Won While Playing Away: 19

% Of Games Won While Playing At Home: 64.8%

Looks like there may be something there, but by the looks of these numbers, nothing to write home about.

Let's dig even deeper. Maybe there is a difference between how the higher seed and lower seed fair while playing at home vs while playing on the road. The main question investigated here is how confidence (determined by who is the higher seed) could determine the distribution of wins home vs away, i.e. does either team feel "more confident" home as opposed to away and thus win more home vs away? Let's see how the home and away teams did while playing at home as opposed to playing away:

Total Home Team/Higher Seed Wins At Home: 21
Total Home Team/Higher Seed Wins Away: 14
Total Home Team/Higher Seed Wins: 35

Total Away Team/Lower Seed Wins At Home: 14
Total Away Team/Lower Seed Wins Away: 5
Total Away Team/Lower Seed Wins: 19

% Of Home Team/Higher Seed Wins Won At Home: 60%
% Of Away Team/Lower Seed Wins Won At Home: 73.7%

A-hah! This is pretty crazy. Looks like the home team's wins are pretty divided between home and away (60%/40%), while the away team benefits much more when they play at home (73.7%/26.3%). Why would the away team "need" to play at home more than the home team? Is it confidence? Does it have to do with starting the series on the road?

What do you all think? Still don't believe anything's there? If you do, why? Psychological factors? Physical factors?

Most importantly, could there be an away team curse?!?

PS, for you Celtics fans, I did a little more analysis with regard to how well the team who won the first game faired vs how the team that lost the first game faired. Bit o' bad news. From 2000-2009, the team that won the first game ended up winning the whole thing 8 out of 10 times. Only 1 time did the away team lose the first game and end up winning the NBA Finals. But hey, rules and curses were meant to be broken.