A Note on Team-Specific Home Advantage in the NBA

Jones Marshall B
Additional contact information
Jones Marshall B: Penn State University

Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports, 2008, vol. 4, issue 3, 15

Abstract: Recently it was reported that in the NBA as a whole, two thirds of the home advantage which teams enjoy when playing at home is accumulated in the first quarter. Home advantage can also be determined for individual teams, and there is good reason for doing so. For example, the relation of home advantage to team statistics such as assists, rebounds, and turnovers can be studied team-specifically but not in the league as a whole. Before any such project is undertaken, however, a major technical problem must be addressed. Formally, team-specific home advantage is a difference score between positively correlated variables (games won at home minus games won away), and difference scores are notoriously unreliable. This unreliability, moreover, is not just an empirical generalization. There is a formal basis for it in the theory of mental tests. This study reports that over a four-year period in the NBA the estimated reliability of team-specific home advantage was 0.284, even though the estimated reliabilities of games won at home and games won away were 0.772 and 0.833 respectively. The implications for research on home advantage are discussed.

Keywords: team-specific; home advantage; reliability; game-long process; basketball (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.2202/1559-0410.1128 (text/html)
For access to full text, subscription to the journal or payment for the individual article is required.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bpj:jqsprt:v:4:y:2008:i:3:n:5

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.degruyter.com/journal/key/jqas/html

DOI: 10.2202/1559-0410.1128

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports is currently edited by Mark Glickman

More articles in Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports from De Gruyter
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Peter Golla ().