BuzzerBeater Forums

Hi all,

Question 1)
Lets say that two equal teams are playing. Each have the same roster stats and players and assistants (the home team has the home helper away team away helper) all things equal.

How often out of ten times would the home team win?

Question 2)

Lets suppose that the away team has a roster that is 20% better than the home team. Now what are the odds of winning (all else equal)?

That's definitely hard to say unless you ask a BB since the GE is hidden.

Trying to crowd source the information also would be hard (impossible?) since we'd probably be unable to get enough "equal" team games to see the results, plus the added randomness from the GE.

I spent some time typing up a detailed response, but was disconnected once I submitted it.

Basically what I typed was that in the NBA, the home team wins roughly 60% (more in playoffs) of the time, due to various factors which may be subjective or unmeasurable. Thus, it would be logical to assume that a home team has a 5-10% increase in performance, or an away team has a decrease in performance.


For the second question, look at the 2014 Suns' and 2014 76ers' offensive ratings. The Suns boast a rating of 108.9, 11% better than the 76ers rating of 99.0. A 20% better offense would be a rating of 118.8, good for greatest offense of all time (I may be wrong, but could not find a listing of all time NBA offenses with a quick google search.)

It is safe to say that a team 20% better than another would win a significant amount of games over their lesser opponents. While homecourt advantage would help the lesser team, a 20% discrepancy in skill is enormous, and it would be an anomaly for the lesser team to win at home, let alone on the road. The above calculation only considers offense after all.




This is all speculative and BB's GE cannot possibly account for all real life aspects. However, I would say it is not unreasonable to believe there is about a 5% advantage for a home team. Ideally, the GE would have characteristics of real life basketball, and use realistic performance adjustments.

Have tried to find an answer to the same question a while ago and here's something I came across (taken from: http://buzzerbeater.wgz.cz/rubriky/take-it-easy-vs-crunch-time). This is more about a team's attitude towards a game rather than home court advantage but you have some solid information in there about that as well:

Here are some aggregate statistics, so that we can look at TiE/CT effects as a whole instead of individual examples. These are obviously not randomly-selected games, since teams attempt to choose TiE/CT for tactical reasons.

When both teams play TiE, the home team has a record of 417-277.
When the home team plays TiE against normal, it has a record of 829-826.
When the home team plays TiE against CT, it has a record of 104-200.
When the home team plays normal against TiE, it has a record of 1262-483.
When the home team plays normal against CT, it has a record of 703-759.
When the home team plays CT against TiE, it has a record of 265-38.
When the home team plays CT against normal, it has a record of 1171-357.
When the home team plays CT against CT, it has 205-107.

not include normal vs. normal, since those will be mostly bot games, but globally the home team edge is at around 63%.
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Home court advantage improves defense and rebounding. If I have to make a guess, I'd say by about 15%, but it's not something I've collected any data on.

(kozlodoev)

I don't think you will be able to find anything more specific than that but if anyone knows anything more I'd be happy to read about it as well.

Last edited by Yossarian at 2/27/2014 3:30:55 AM

Thanks for your analysis.

Maybe my assumption of 20% is too high. I am guessing between 5-10% would make more sense as a factor.

BTW I do have some info. The USA Offsite Predictor seems to indicate that home court advantage results in 10% better defense and rebounding. Overall this results in a 5 point variance no matter the pace used. Or a 70%-30% win ratio.

The away team has to be about 7% better than the home team in order to win the game more often.

This is quite a large barrier to overcome during the playoffs. Interesting.

I dont have an answer to second question.

But answering the first one is easy. If teams are equal (will never happen), than home team will win all games. All of them.

No, you wrong and he is right. Because there is only 1 outcome in the calculation. it is proved by 2teams playing same week twice with the same tactics and substitution patterns. The results used to be identical.