What About Home Ice?

As if you needed anything more than last night to remind you there are two winter sports championships going on right now (you should see what the "previous channel" button on my remote looks like), your feedback has been heard.

I went on and on about home court advantage for the NBA Finals, so what about home ice advantage for the Stanley Cup Finals? Sorry for the wait NHL fans. Below is a similar analysis to my home court advantage analysis for basketball. For making you wait the whole weekend before you were able to read this in hopes for an escape to the away team curse, I went back to the 1990 Stanley Cup, just for you. Can we be friends again?

Let's start with your basic statistics. 19 Stanley Cup Finals have been played out from 1990 - 2009 (due to the '04-'05 lockout). In those 19 Stanley Cups, 106 games have been played (an average of about 5 and a half games per year). Ahh... the stage is set. Let's begin:

Home Team/Higher Seed Stanley Cup Champions: 15
Away Team/Lower Seed Stanley Cup Champions: 4

It's shocking how similar this is to my 10 year analysis of the NBA Finals home/higher seed vs away/lower seed performance. For the NBA, the higher seed won the NBA Finals 80% of the time. Here, over 19 seasons (a pretty good amount of data), the higher seed has won 79% of the Stanley Cups. Still, let's dig deeper (don't want to short my NHL readers):

Once again, let's look at how many times the team playing at home won as opposed to the team playing on the road, regardless of whether they were the higher or lower seed:

Total NHL Stanley Cup Games: 106
Total Won At Home: 54
Total Away Wins: 52

% of Games Won While Playing At Home: 50.9%

Whoa, what?!? Personally, this stumps me quite a bit. How can the higher seed be winning the Stanley Cup 79% of time and yet the team at home only wins a little more than half the time? Those are two drastically contradicting numbers, in my opinion, and here's why. A big difference between the higher seed and the lower seed in a finals is who gets to play more games at home. It would appear that wouldn't matter based on these numbers, but the total # of Stanley Cups by the higher and lower seed shows things quite differently.

Let's try adding the final piece of the puzzle, that being the "confidence" factor, or how both the higher seed and the lower seed do while home and away:

Total Home Team/Higher Seed Wins At Home: 35
Total Home Team/Higher Seed Wins Away: 29
Total Home Team/Higher Seed Wins: 64

Total Away Team/Lower Seed Wins At Home: 19
Total Away Team/Lower Seed Wins Away: 23
Total Away Team/Lower Seed Wins: 42

% Of Home Team/Higher Seed Wins Won At Home: 54.7%
% Of Away Team/Lower Seed Wins Won At Home: 45.2%

This, to me, is incredible. The lower seed actually wins more games on average while playing away than they do while playing at home.

Let's pair this up with a little bit of extra analysis I did. Of the 19 Stanley Cup Finals, the lower seed has managed to win game 1, thus "take away" home ice advantage, 9 times, or 47% of the time. This is a big difference between the NBA Finals in which of the past 10 NBA Finals the away team has only managed to win the first game 2 times. Of these 9 times in which the lower seed has effectively "stolen home ice advantage," the Away Team has only ended up winning the series 3 times. Granted, better than when they don't win the first game (1 championship in 10 Stanley Cup series), but still nothing that demonstrates a true advantage to playing at home.

So is there no such thing as home ice advantage? And why would this be so different from the NBA? Let me know what you think.