What’s a Home Playoff Game Worth Now?
Since the pandemic, we've seen some interesting changes to the effects of home advantage.
With the NBA and NHL playoffs now in full swing, the effect of home court/ice advantage will naturally come into greater focus. As of Monday afternoon, NBA teams had won 60.0 percent of their home games in the 2025 playoffs — up from 54.4 percent during the regular season, but down from historical playoff norms — while NHL home teams were winning an uncharacteristically high 67.7 percent of their games this postseason.
Of course, that’s just in the sample of fewer than two weeks this year. When I originally looked at the value of a home playoff game in 2017, I had used nearly two decades’ worth of data from the “Big Four” North American men’s leagues (NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL) to compare how much more (or less) home teams won in the playoffs than we’d expect — based on the both Elo ratings of the teams at a hypothetical neutral site, and how much of an extra boost home teams got in the playoffs relative to the regular season. Back then, I found that NBA (and NFL) teams got a sizable bounce in the playoffs at home, even after accounting for the larger effect they saw during the regular season, while MLB and NHL teams got practically no boost relative to the regular season.1
Needless to say, a lot has changed since 2017. Back then, the idea of playing games in front of reduced crowds or empty stadiums was nearly unheard of in North America. Then the pandemic happened, with its cardboard cut-out fans, bubble environments and fake crowd noise. It provided us with a lot of data on the meaning of home advantage, and its effects still seem to be getting sorted out on the court, field and ice.
To compare the updated results with my findings from 2017, let’s replicate the same chart as before — except we’ll use Elo ratings for every sport (now including hockey) to set an “expected” win probability under neutral conditions as a means of controlling for team quality in each matchup. We’ll also break the data out into three eras: “Pre-Covid” (2010-2019 seasons); “Covid” (2020-2021 seasons);2 and “Post-Covid” (2022-present).
Unsurprisingly, the NBA’s playoff home advantage dipped during the pandemic years and has returned to essentially what it was before, at least relative to the regular season. (Which itself is down from pre-pandemic levels.) But not every other sport has behaved quite like we’d expect during and after the pandemic seasons.
The NHL, for instance, actually saw a higher boost for home playoff teams relative to the regular season during the Covid seasons than either before or since. We had noted previously that hockey teams had a negative playoff home-ice effect relative to the regular season — something that disappeared during the pandemic, but then returned on the other side even after including this year’s hot start for home teams.
Meanwhile, baseball — which had not previously seen much of a playoff boost to HFA above and beyond the regular season — got much better results from home teams in the postseason than expected during the pandemic… and yet, home playoff teams have been much worse ever since. (MLB in the post-Covid era is the only sport/era/season-phase combo where home teams had a losing record overall.)
And football has seen some of the most dramatic shifts. After recording a similar home playoff boost as the NBA (relative to the regular season) before the pandemic, the NFL famously saw home-field advantage almost completely evaporate during the 2020 and 2021 seasons. But ever since, NFL teams have won a scorching 77.1 percent of home playoff games, good for a nearly 13-percentage point boost over what we’d expect from the regular season. That’s by far the largest playoff bump we see from any league in any era, either in this research or the previous installment.
There’s still much we don’t know about the origin of home advantage across different sports, and how much can be attributed to factors like the crowd’s ability to make noise and pressure opponents into making mistakes — or pressure the referees into favorable calls. Some aspects of home advantage have evolved over time as leagues put a greater emphasis on using technology to correct calls made on the field, or to more effectively teach refs the art of making good calls under pressure. And the pandemic may have simply accelerated changes in the dynamics of home-field advantage that were already underway.
But as much as things have changed since before 2020, the lessons for the playoffs currently underway remain relatively similar: Home-court matters a lot in the NBA, especially during the postseason, while a home playoff game on ice isn’t even as valuable as it was during the regular season.
Filed under: NBA, NHL, NFL, Baseball
In fact, NHL teams were less likely to win at home in the playoffs than the regular season, after accounting for the fact that better teams host more playoff games.
This is casting a bit of a wide net, since the 2019-20 NBA and NHL regular seasons were not played in the pandemic — while the playoffs were — and the 2020 MLB and NFL regular seasons were played in the pandemic. But for the sake of consistent comparisons, it was easier to keep things uniform in terms of time frames.
I love this analysis. What are the sample sizes by sport? I imagine it's largest for NBA and NHL and still very small for the NFL