Fact or Fiction: Is home-court advantage in the NBA’s regular season dead?

Each week during the 2024-25 NBA season, we will take a deeper dive into some of the league’s biggest storylines in an attempt to determine whether trends are based more in fact or fiction moving forward.

[Last week: Under the rise of Evan Mobley, the Cavaliers are contenders again]

Fact or Fiction: Home-court advantage is dead

The NBA’s home team won 60% of its regular-season games from 2000 to 2013, clear evidence of home-court advantage. That number dipped to 58% for the first time this century in 2014, as teams for the first time averaged more than 20 3-point attempts per game, and it held steady around that figure until the end of last decade, when the COVID-19 pandemic uncovered a new understanding of home-court advantage.

The number understandably fell to a new low (54%) during the 2020-21 season, when for the most part arenas were empty. With the exception of the 2022-23 campaign, when it spiked to 58% again, the figure has held firm at 54% ever since, including this season, as teams’ 3-point attempts have risen on average above 35 per game. Which leads us to wonder: Is home-court advantage pretty much dead?

Home-court advantage has declined from an average winning percentage of 60% for the first 15 years of the decade to 54% in four of the past five years.

Whichever team made more 3s in a given game has been a far better indicator of who actually won. The team that makes more 3s wins about 67% of the time, and that number has largely held true for the last decade. (At the turn of the century, the number was closer to 60%, same as home-court advantage.)

This season, it has not mattered where teams are playing. Home teams are 39-19 when they make more 3s; road teams are 36-20 when they make more 3s. You are not necessarily more likely to make more 3s if you are playing at home. That is not true for past seasons, however. Over the previous five years, home teams won 71% of the games in which they made more 3s; road teams won 62% of them. So home-court advantage still exists, and we should expect the numbers this season to find those levels again as the sample size increases.

This embedded content is not…

Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/fact-or-fiction-is-home-court-advantage-in-the-nbas-regular-season-dead-194958543.html

Author : Yahoo Sports

Publish date : 2024-11-08 19:49:00

Copyright for syndicated content belongs to the linked Source.