An Estimate of Home-Court Advantage
Posted: May 26th, 2025, 5:25 pm
Good afternoon,
I'm working on a rolling Team Ratings Index (it will take a while) but figured in the meantime that to develop this file, I'd need to estimate home-court advantage. Of course, if you play in the Swamp starting in 2026, your dreams go to die, but it's helpful to capture the overall trend.
This is not too much more than an estimate. It's not a team comparison and the game-to-game performances are notably volatile (probably by design).
We sampled all 29 teams' first 15 home games of the 2025 season (435 games, some road opponents could be over-represented) to identify the gap between home and road scoring. Overall, home teams outscored their road counterparts by about 5.62%, ie. for every 100 road team points, the home team scored roughly 105.6 points.
Adjusted for league median point total (118.25 points per game), this indicates an approximate 6.5-point home court advantage. Basically, if median teams with median pace squared off, I'd estimate the average score would be something like 121.5-115. (There might be a lot of sub-trends worth exploring here (or maybe not); this is just a starting point.)
This is pretty early stages but with all the great content ongoing (can't wait for Top 25 through Top ONE rankings), figured I'd share some supplementary analysis.
GOOD LUCK TO THE PLAYOFF TEAMS - may home court be on your side.
Go nets
I'm working on a rolling Team Ratings Index (it will take a while) but figured in the meantime that to develop this file, I'd need to estimate home-court advantage. Of course, if you play in the Swamp starting in 2026, your dreams go to die, but it's helpful to capture the overall trend.
This is not too much more than an estimate. It's not a team comparison and the game-to-game performances are notably volatile (probably by design).
We sampled all 29 teams' first 15 home games of the 2025 season (435 games, some road opponents could be over-represented) to identify the gap between home and road scoring. Overall, home teams outscored their road counterparts by about 5.62%, ie. for every 100 road team points, the home team scored roughly 105.6 points.
Adjusted for league median point total (118.25 points per game), this indicates an approximate 6.5-point home court advantage. Basically, if median teams with median pace squared off, I'd estimate the average score would be something like 121.5-115. (There might be a lot of sub-trends worth exploring here (or maybe not); this is just a starting point.)
This is pretty early stages but with all the great content ongoing (can't wait for Top 25 through Top ONE rankings), figured I'd share some supplementary analysis.
GOOD LUCK TO THE PLAYOFF TEAMS - may home court be on your side.
Go nets
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