Scorecasting (18 page)

It was one of those games that get lost in the folds of an NBA season schedule, a thoroughly forgettable midweek, midseason clash between the
Portland Trail Blazers and the
San Antonio Spurs. In the late afternoon of February 25, 2009, the bus carrying most of the Portland players arrived in the loading dock of San Antonio’s AT&T Center, surely the only arena in the league that carries the faint odor of a rodeo. The Blazers had played—and lost—in Houston the previous night, and as the players slogged through the catacombs of the arena, headphones wrapped around their ears, they wore the vacant, exhausted looks of employees grinding through a business trip.

Which, you could contend, they were. At the end of the day—an end that couldn’t come soon enough for them—they were just another pack of salaried employees engaged in business, a thousand miles from home, sleeping in strange beds, eating bland room service food thanks to a generous per diem, staring at a string of unfamiliar faces. It’s a truism of business travel: Even when you go first class—and Lord knows the Blazers, a team owned by billionaire Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen, go first class—it still isn’t home.

The Blazers and the Spurs had nearly identical records at the
time, and owing to injuries, the Spurs were missing two of their three stars, Tim Duncan and
Manu Ginobili, leaving only quicksilver point guard
Tony Parker and a slew of role players. But it hardly mattered. The Las Vegas line predicted that the Spurs would win by as many as nine points. The Spurs’ television broadcast began with an upbeat intro: “No Tim? No Manu? No problem!” Sitting casually on the scorer’s table before the game, a Portland assistant coach cackled and confided matter-of-factly, “Ain’t no way we’re winning this motherf——.”

Hearing those pronouncements, so favorable for San Antonio and so unfavorable for Portland, one could be forgiven for wondering whether the rules of basketball were somehow different on the road, whether the height of the goals or the number of points awarded for a made basket changed once a team left home. The Blazers could have been (should have been?) brimming with confidence and optimism, relishing the chance to beat the Spurs, a team that had an almost identical win-loss record but was playing shorthanded. Instead, the Blazers projected the same kind of defeatism and anticipated doom that a conservative Republican political candidate might feel campaigning in San Francisco.

Then again, maybe the collective fear and loathing was well placed. For all the conventional sports wisdom that can be disproved, deconstructed, or, at the very least, called into question, home team advantage is no myth. Indisputably, it exists. And it exists with remarkable consistency. Across all sports and all levels, going back decades, from Japanese baseball to Brazilian soccer to college basketball, the majority of the time the team hosting a game will win.

Consider the following table, which documents the home field advantage across 19 different sports leagues covering more than 40 countries, going back as far as we could (ordered from highest to lowest advantage by sport).

The advantage exists in all sports to varying degrees. The home team wins 54 percent of the time in Major League
Baseball, nearly 63 percent of the time in the NBA, nearly 58 percent in the NFL, and 59 percent in the NHL. College basketball teams boast a
whopping 69 percent home team success rate, and NCAA football confers a nearly as impressive 64 percent home team advantage. Across 43 professional soccer leagues in 24 different countries spanning Europe, South America, Asia, Africa, Australia, and the United States
^*
(covering more than 66,000 games), the home field advantage in soccer worldwide is 62.4 percent. For nearly every rugby match in more than 125 countries dating back to as early as 1871, the home field advantage is 58 percent. For international cricket dating back to as early as 1877, covering matches from ten countries, the home winning percentage is 60 percent.

As radically as sports have changed through the years—the introduction of a three-point line in basketball, the addition of a designated hitter in MLB, the ever-escalating size of football players wearing helmets made of material other than leather—the home field advantage is almost eerily constant through time. In more than 100 baseball seasons, not once have the road teams collectively won more games than the home teams. The lowest success rate home teams have ever experienced in a baseball season was 50.7 percent in 1923; the highest was 58.1 percent in 1931.

In every season of play in the NBA, the NHL, and international soccer leagues, collectively the home teams have won more games than the road teams. In 43 of the 44 NFL seasons, home teams won at least 50.8 percent of their games. (In only one anomalous year, 1968, did home teams win less than half the games, mostly because there were five ties that season.) In 140 seasons of college football, there has never been a year when home teams have failed to win more games than road teams. The size of the advantage is remarkably stable in each sport, too: The home team’s success rate is almost exactly the same in the last decade as it was 50 or even 100 years ago.

Another curious feature of the home field advantage: It is essentially the same within any sport, no matter where the games
are played. The Nippon Professional Baseball League in Japan has a home field advantage almost identical to that of Major League Baseball in the United States. The home field advantage in Arena football is virtually the same as it is in the NFL. The home winning percentage in the NBA is a virtual mirror image of that in the WNBA. In professional soccer, the sport with the largest home field advantage, hosting teams in three of Europe’s most popular leagues—the English Premier, the Spanish La Liga, and the Italian Serie A—win about 65 percent of the time. Looking at 40 other soccer leagues in 24 different countries, the home field advantage hovers around 63 percent. All these statistics pertain only to the regular season in each sport, but the numbers are almost exactly the same for the playoffs.
^*

Some sports are even set up to give the home team an inherent advantage. In baseball, the home team bats last, so it always comes to bat knowing precisely how many runs it must score to win the game and can devise a strategy accordingly. (But notice that baseball has the
lowest
home winning percentage of the major sports, so that can’t be a primary explanation.)

Another way to look at the home field advantage is to identify
how many
teams win more games at home than on the road. In the NBA, an astounding 98.6 percent of teams fare better at home than on the road. That means that in most seasons
all
NBA teams have better home than road records. At the time of the Blazers-Spurs game, Portland was 23–5 at home and 12–16 on
the road, an 82 percent winning percentage at home versus 43 percent on the road. During that 2008–2009 season, only one team in the entire league would fare better on the road than at home, the lowly
Minnesota Timberwolves, who were comparably awful regardless of venue: 11–30 at home and 13–28 away from Minneapolis. Most teams each year are similar to the Chicago Bulls of that season, who went 28–13 at home and the exact inverse, 13–28, on the road. Similarly, in hockey and soccer, more than 90 percent of the teams fare better at home than on the road. Even in the NFL and MLB, the leagues with the lowest home winning percentages, more than three-quarters of teams do better at home.

It’s little wonder that leagues reward the best teams in the regular season with “home field advantage” for the playoffs—it’s a hell of an incentive to win those dreary midseason games. And no wonder those playoff teams talk openly of aiming to achieve a “split on the road,” essentially conceding the unlikelihood of winning multiple games away from home. When teams are down by a small margin in the final seconds of a game, there is even an adage, “Play for the tie at home and the win on the road.” Think about this for a moment: Teams in an identical situation will strategize differently solely on the basis of
where
the game is being played.

Before considering the causes of the home field advantage, keep this premise in mind: There is considerable economic incentive for home teams to win as often as possible. When the home team wins, the consumers—that is, the ticket-buying fans—leave happy. The better the home team plays, the more likely fans are to buy tickets and hats and T-shirts, renew their luxury suite leases, and drink beer, overpriced and watered down as it might be. The better the home team plays, the more likely businesses and corporations are to buy sponsorships and the more likely local television networks are to bid for rights fees. A lot of sports marketing, after all, is driven by the desire to associate with a winner. In San Antonio, if the fans consistently left disappointed, it’s unlikely that AT&T would slather its name and logo on most of the surface area of the arena or that Budweiser Select, Sprite, “your Texas Ford dealers,”
Southwest Airlines, and other sponsors would underwrite T-shirt giveaways, Bobble Head Night, and a halftime shooting contest.

By extension, the leagues have an incentive for the home teams to win. Although attendance and revenue rise in step with winning percentage for most teams, they rise even more sharply with
home
winning percentage. And healthier individual franchises make for a stronger collective. Does this mean leagues and executives are fixing games in favor of home teams? Of course not. But does it make sense that they would want to take subtle measures to endow the home team with (legal) edges? Sure. It would be irrational if they
didn’t
.

The fact that the home field advantage exists is undeniable. But
why
does it exist? It’s not for the reasons you might think. Let’s start with conventional explanations and see where they fail us.

Let’s go back to that February night in San Antonio. With a few minutes remaining before the tip-off, the public address announcer presented the starting lineups. The Blazers were introduced in a lifeless and staccato monotone that recalled the no-purchase-necessary-void-where-prohibited-consult-your-doctor-if-erections-last-more-than-four-hours-nobody-is-listening-to-me disclaimers at the end of commercials. Five Blazers came onto the court to a smattering of boos and then retreated into a team huddle.

Then it was time to introduce YOURRRRRRRRRRR SAN ANTONIOOOOOO SPURSSSSSSS!!! The lights dimmed. Strobes circled the floor. Music blasted. The indifferent PA announcer suddenly transformed himself into an unnaturally enthusiastic basso profundo as TOOOOOOooooo-NNNNNNEEEEEeeee PARrrrrrKERrrrrrrrrrr and his teammates were introduced. As the players took the floor to thunderous applause, voluptuous dancers with black-and-silver skirts aerosoled onto their impossibly sculpted bodies did elaborate pirouettes. Charles Lindbergh was barely treated to this kind of fanfare when his plane touched down in Paris.

On the first possession of the game, the Blazers’ best player,
Brandon Roy, missed a three-pointer from the baseline. As the Spurs headed up court, Parker commanded the ball. Slaloming around the Blazers’ defense, he finally unspooled an elegant finger roll with his right hand and simultaneously was fouled by a late-arriving defender. The shot went in, triggering another robust “TONY PARKER” from the announcer. Parker made the free throw, and as the organ played, the crowd went nuts. So it went. Amid chants of “De-fense” the Blazers missed shot after wayward shot. Amid exhortations of “Da-da-da-da-da-daaaa … charge!” the Spurs made basket after basket. After barely two minutes, the Spurs were winning 7–2 and 18,672 fans were ecstatic.

It all stood to reason, right? It’s logical that you will play better when you’re being cheered and applauded and serenaded with chants, when your favorite songs blare on the PA system, and when your pregame introduction is accompanied by fireworks, figuratively and, as is sometimes the case in the NBA, literally. Conversely, common sense suggests that you will perform worse at your job when throngs of strangers are booing you and questioning the chastity of your sister and thwacking those infernal Thunderstix as you shoot free throws or strain to be heard in the huddle. And if chanting and taunting and noise don’t bother you, athletes who have visited Philadelphia can attest that getting pelted with batteries while you play or cheered sarcastically when you’re temporarily paralyzed doesn’t exactly optimize performance, either.

But although the Spurs were outplaying the Blazers, it probably wasn’t because of the crowd, the splashy introductions, or even the gyrating Silver Dancers—not directly, anyway. We’ve found that fans’ influence on the players is pretty small. Much as crowds like to think they’re vitally important in spurring on their team—the “sixth man,” as they say in basketball—they’re not. All those fans with their faces painted and their “number one” foam fingers pointing skyward? The Duke University student section with their clever taunts and Speedo attire? Despite Coach K’s insistence to the contrary, they don’t, sad to say, have much impact on the players.