In honor of Game 1 of the NBA Finals, which starts Thursday night, here is a post about home court advantage. The Lakers have home court advantage over the Celtics.
Here is a scholarly article on home advantage. It its introduction it notes that in the NBA, about 61% of the time the home team wins. The article does argue that due to the construction of the league schedule this number is inflated because the visiting team typically has had less time between games than the home team. For sake of argument we will assume home-court advantage is 61%.
Consider a theoretical seven-game series between two evenly-matched teams. One team has home-court advantage, meaning they will have four out of the possible seven games in their home arena. We therefore assume that the home team has a 61% chance of winning any given game. What is the probability of the team with home-court advantage winning? The probability is about 53.5%. This implies that home-court advantage increases the probability of winning by about 3.5%.
As noted
here and
here, the Celtics focused their regular season on preparing for the playoffs and worried less about accumulating wins. In this case, it appears that the trade-off was worth it as they did make the finals even without home-court advantage for the last two rounds.
In the NHL the home team wins approximately 55% of the time. In a seven-game series between two evenly-matched teams, the home team will win with a probability of 51.6%. Home-ice in the NHL is therefore worth about a 1.6% percent increase in winning.
...and ironically European sports leagues are capitalist. The Washington Nationals have the first pick in the Major League Baseball draft for the second year in a row based on their poor performance. It just so happens that in these past two years two of the best prospects in recent memory have been available: Steven Strasburg, the best pitching prospect, and Bryce Harper, the best hitting prospect, who has been described as the Lebron James of baseball. In a few years they could potentially have the best two players in baseball on their team. (On the other hand, who know what will happen).
Here is a scholarly article on home advantage. It its introduction it notes that in the NBA, about 61% of the time the home team wins. The article does argue that due to the construction of the league schedule this number is inflated because the visiting team typically has had less time between games than the home team. For sake of argument we will assume home-court advantage is 61%.