Research, for example, of over 25,000 regular season NBA games conducted in 2013 by Jimmy Boyd for his site found Utah and Denver to have the strongest home advantages, although the coastal Seattle SuperSonics and Golden State Warriors were third and fourth. Considering that the Nuggets missed the playoffs by a single game and, despite being ninth in the Western Conference, were only three games back behind the third seed Portland Trail Blazers, a two or three game difference could have major implications in a hotly contested playoff seeding race.įinding that high altitude teams have stronger home court advantages is not necessarily new.
DENVER ALTITUDE FULL
Their research showed that the home advantage of these two teams roughly amounted to a full 2.5 wins per season more than the team with the weakest home court advantage, the Brooklyn Nets. Baumer of Smith College, found that the two NBA teams with the strongest home court advantages – and significantly so – were indeed those at the league’s two highest elevations: the Denver Nuggets, followed by the Utah Jazz. Matthews of Loyola University Chicago and Benjamin S. Lopez of Skidmore College and Director of Data and Analytics for the NFL, along with Gregory J. There is an abundance of evidence, however, to support the edge they get from their high altitude being very real.Ī recent study on randomness in North American sports using betting market odds data (read the full manuscript here and a blog post with a partial summary here) which was conducted by Michael J. And while this difference between 16.7% and 18.7% may seem minor, it translates to 1.6 wins over the course of a full 82-game season, meaning that Denver’s home advantage could be netting them one or two wins more per season than that of the average NBA team – which, as Nuggets fans are painfully aware, could among other things mean the difference between making or missing the playoffs.Īnother possibility, of course, would be that the Nuggets are simply a worse-than-average road team, which would likewise increase the discrepancy between their home and away records.
390 on the road, resulting in a home record that was 18.7% better. In the same time frame, the Nuggets went. 416, meaning that teams performed 16.7% better at home than on the road. Using home/road record data from, I calculated that in the three latest seasons starting with 2015-16, the average home record of all teams in the NBA was.
0 kommentar(er)
