Home Ice Advantage?

In sports, especially during the playoffs, everyone invariably talks about the mythical 'home advantage'. The boost from the home fans and familiar settings all lead to some advantage in a best of seven series against another team. Most teams make it their goal in the regular season to earn this advantage for as long as they can. After all, it's better to have four games at home than three. But how much does this 'advantage' really come into play?


If you take the teams as a whole, right now the home teams have a 27-24 (.529) record. In the second round alone so far, the home teams are 4-3. To get a historical perspective on what the numbers mean, the records of the home teams since the 2000-2001 season were calculated.

2000-01: 43-45 (.489)
2001-02: 47-43 (.522)
2002-03: 49-40 (.551)
2003-04: 52-37 (.584)
2005-06: 44-39 (.530)
2006-07: 45-36 (.556)
2007-08: 50-35 (.588)

From a statistical standpoint, there is definitely an advantage to the home team (although usually slight). The trend indicates that the home teams have gained in their advantage over the past nine years, although without further analysis 2000-01 could be an anomylous year where the road teams actually had the upper hand (which makes some sense...finalist New Jersey was 8-4 on the road that year in the playoffs, and champion Colorado was 7-3).

The most interesting deviation occurs when only game sevens are observed. In the same period as above, the home team is 20-9 (.690) in game seven. In other words, having home ice advantage is nice during a series, but it's one of the most important factors when a series goes the distance.