Tipico Tips: How to treat home-court advantage during the pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed sports betting in ways that many casual bettors have not even noticed. It has changed the way we work, the way we shop, and the way we interact with others. It shouldn’t be a surprise that it has crossed over into sports as well. One of the ways that it has had a big impact is with how we account for home-court advantage. After Rudy Gobert touched a few microphones and brought the entire sports world to its knees, the discussions started moving to what impact neutral courts and no fans in the stands would have on scores.

During the NFL Football season, we saw the impacts of no fans in most if not all the arena’s around the country. Even in the few venues that did allow a percentage of fans to come to games, we saw the numbers show that home-field advantage was slightly less important than in year’s past. Many handicappers dropped their adjustments down to under one point, if anything at all, for home-field advantage this season. The conventional wisdom was that home field is worth three points, but real handicappers already knew that number was too high. Every team has a different level of home-field advantage, which was usually somewhere between 1.5-2 points in the NFL pre-pandemic. As you can see here, when you solve for home-field advantage this season, it was basically zero. 

The NBA is a different animal than the NFL. In the NFL, teams play only once a week with a minimum of four days rest and a usual time of 6-7 days between games. In the NBA, we may see teams play on back-to-back nights. Teams may have three games in four or five days, four games in a week in three different cities. The comparisons are not as straightforward as they are with the NFL. We do have half a season worth of NBA pandemic stats that we can look at for comparison as well but remember the end of last season was played on a neutral site, so we do not have any home-court advantage numbers to look at from last season. 

This year, road teams have won 47.36% of the games they have played. Home teams still have a slight edge, but that number is way lower than in recent years. Excluding last season because of the early stop and bubble at the end, we see that 47% from this year is higher than normal. Road teams in 2018/2019 won just 40.7% of their games. In 2017-2018, that number was 42.1%, and in 2016-2017, that number was 41.7%. Maybe it will smooth out over the rest of the season, but as of now, road teams are running about 5% above the best record they have had in the last four years. They are running more than 6% above the average over the last four seasons, meaning home-field advantage is not as much of a factor as it used to be. Home teams still win slightly more often than a random coin flip, but it used to be more like 60/40 and now, at best, it’s a couple percentage points based on the most recent numbers. 

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