PeterJohn
Years ago
How much is home court worth in the NBL?
Teams are generally accepted as doing better on home courts than in away games. This season there's also been a lot of talk about "home cooking" from refs increasing that advantage for some teams. So I decided to see what home court advantage is worth to each team. I've done this by looking at winning and losing records home and away and at the points scored differential between each team's home and away games.
We still have about a third of the regular season to go so the picture will change. I still found it interesting reading.
Across the league, teams have won 69% of home games and 31% of away games. On this measure Cairns have the biggest home advantage - 71% won at home and 11% away. They're followed by NZ (89% vs 38%), Adelaide (70% vs 25%) and Melbourne (82% vs 38%). On this measure, home advantage is higher than the past two seasons - 59% vs 41% were the league comparisons for both 2013-14 and 2014-15.
Note that Sydney is the only team with a losing record at home (3-7) and no team has a winning record on the road. Perth are 6-6 on the road and everyone else has a losing record on the road.
In each of the past two seasons, at least two teams had winning road records.
This season teams have scored 11.9 points per game more at home than away. Cairns again lead the way, +16 points at home vs away. This time they're followed by Illawarra (+14), Perth (+12.5) and Adelaide (+12). Sydney is last again, +6 points at home vs away.
On this measure, the home advantage is also substantially higher than in each of the last two seasons. In 2014-15 teams were +7 points at home vs away and in 2013-14 they were +7. In each of those years, at least one team had a negative points differential for home vs away games.
As stated above, these numbers will change, possibly quite a bit, over the last 40 games of the regular season. Nonetheless, I think the general story will still be that home court is a bigger advantage this year than in the past couple of years, across the league as a whole. Whether that's about teams responding to greater crowd animation or referees more easily influenced by home crowds/teams than in the past couple of years, who knows?
