Is home ice advantage real?

[fishy 1,757]

I am not good at introductions. I wanted to know if home ice advantage exists. Here is what I found:

 

Short answer: nothing. I didn’t realize how many factors there would be to answering the question of whether home ice advantage exists until I actually started trying to figure it out. If I actually wanted to find something, I could have looked at a larger data pool by including other teams and considering more than one season.

 

However, I didn’t do that. I’m not going to do that, either.

 

So, here are the uninformed and inconclusive results I found!

 

Long answer: Chicago had a better record on home ice than when they were visiting another rink. Visiting, we had a 19-16-1, 36 total games, a 52.8% win rate. Four of the 19 wins went into overtime, and two went into a shootout. What do I make of this? I don’t know. Moving on.

 

At home, we had a 22-10-5 record, 37 total games, a 59.8% win rate. Of the 22 wins, 1 game ended in overtime and 3 ended in a shootout. So, yeah, those are the numbers.

 

So, sure, looking just at that, home ice advantage is real. You’re 7% more likely to win when you play at home, right? Probably not. But I’m not going out of my way to find more evidence.

 

At home, we were more likely to finish a game in regulation than we were as a visiting team. However, at home, we were more likely to lose a game in overtime - with 5 overtime losses and 4 overtime wins, the difference is narrow, but it’s still a difference. After all, this article is all about drawing conclusions without enough evidence for the sake of writing at least 500 words about this topic.

 

As a visiting team, we were more likely to win in overtime than lose - we only had one overtime loss when we were away, but 6 of our wins were won in overtime. What do we make of that? Well, obviously, that means that we have better chances of beating a team at the absolute last second when we played on their ice. Again, this is undeniably true.

 

I guess, at this point, I ought to just believe everyone when they say that location of the game doesn’t matter. However, if you, like me, want to find out whether the boomers are actually telling the truth when they say that, then here’s my recommendation for figuring it out:

 

First, look at more than one team. It’s difficult to know whether you’re winning because you’re good or because of the ice advantage.

 

Second, look at more than one season. You may even uncover that one particular team has consistently better records when they’re home.

 

Third, know how the teams did. If I cared enough about answering this question, I would look to see if we played more playoff teams when we were away or at home. Who knows. Definitely not me.

Edited May 12, 2021 by fishy

[Spartan 4,552]

as someone who has taken multiple statistics classes, the first few sentences hurt me to my core to read lmao, but you somewhat saved it with the explanation of what you could theoretically do to figure it out.

 

2 hours ago, fishy said:

So, sure, looking just at that, home ice advantage is real. You’re 7% more likely to win when you play at home, right? Probably not. But I’m not going out of my way to find more evidence.

P. a. i. n. But, does make a good point that I was thinking about earlier today while reading an article about how the pens and islanders are both phenomenal at home, garbage away. Might actually look into it for a specific team over the seasons, overall league stats would likely be too much effort for me. Nice concept, execution has....room to improve

Edited May 12, 2021 by Spartan