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NBA

The Altitude Exception

,   and  Justin Pietsch
2 min read
Regular-season home win rate minus road win rate in 1984–2001 (light blue) and 2002–26 (darker blue). Every franchise with at least 400 home games in both halves of the record saw its home…

Part 7 of a series on the NBA’s fading home court advantage; start with Home Court Advantage Is Fading.

Denver and Utah still have the NBA’s biggest regular-season home edges, even though both edges shrank along with everyone else’s. They are also the league’s only two teams that play at altitude. Thin air is a plausible reason visiting teams struggle there, though two teams are too few to separate altitude from everything else distinctive about Denver and Utah.

Regular-season home win rate minus road win rate in 1984–2001 (light blue) and 2002–26 (darker blue). Every franchise with at least 400 home games in both halves of the record saw its home edge shrink; Denver’s and Utah’s are still the biggest since 2002. The chart follows teams that stayed in the same city across both halves: a renamed team in the same city counts as one franchise, while a team that moved to another city counts as a new one. Dashed lines show the average across the franchises shown, each counted equally.
Regular-season home win rate minus road win rate in 1984–2001 (light blue) and 2002–26 (darker blue). Every franchise with at least 400 home games in both halves of the record saw its home edge shrink; Denver’s and Utah’s are still the biggest since 2002. The chart follows teams that stayed in the same city across both halves: a renamed team in the same city counts as one franchise, while a team that moved to another city counts as a new one. Dashed lines show the average across the franchises shown, each counted equally.

All 26 franchises in the chart lost some home edge. Denver’s gap fell by about 13 percentage points and Utah’s by 9, yet both remain at the top. Sacramento and Phoenix had the biggest raw drops, from unusually high starting points.

The chart keeps a city change separate because this is a question about where a team plays: Seattle and Oklahoma City, or New Jersey and Brooklyn, are different home settings. An all-time ranking puts the old Seattle, Kansas City, and New Jersey names unusually high partly because those records end before many of the league’s low-advantage seasons. Joining those names to their successors would hide the change of building and city.

The differences between franchises are not all random variation: roughly 70% of the observed spread in regular-season home edges reflects real differences. Denver and Utah sit at the top of that spread, but the data cannot say how much of their lead comes from elevation itself.

Playoff arenas are harder to rank

In the playoffs, most franchises have fewer than 150 home games across the record. That is too little to distinguish one arena’s home edge from another’s reliably. It does not mean home court advantage disappears in the playoffs; it means the franchise ranking is too uncertain to trust. The Playoffs Are Different (and the Same) examines the postseason edge.

Denver and Utah are still the regular-season exception. Their home edges faded, but they remain the toughest places to visit.

Next: How I Know This Isn’t Made Up. Every finding in this series was run through a battery of tests built specifically to break it; here’s what survived.

Back to the series hub: The Disappearing Home-Court Advantage

Data: NBA.com Stats, pulled with the open-source nba_api tool; attendance records from Basketball-Reference.

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