The Home Advantage in the National Basketball Association Conference Finals and Finals Series From 1979 to 2019: A Mediation Analysis of Offensive and Defensive Skills
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study examined the home advantage effect in decisive National Basketball Association Conference Finals and Finals series playoff games from 1979 to 2019 (the 3-point shot era). We also examined the potential contribution of various offensive- and defensive-based skills and whether these skills mediated the relationship between game status (decisive vs. nondecisive) and outcome (win vs. loss). Overall, we found evidence of a home court advantage with the home team winning 63% of the decisive playoff games and 66% of the nondecisive playoff games. After adjusting for multiple comparisons and regular season win percentage, the home team had significantly more defensive rebounds and steals in Game 5 when trailing 3-1 going into that game. Mediation analyses did not reveal any significant findings when examining the impact of decisive game status on performance through offensive and defensive skills, thus suggesting there are other explanations for the home advantage effect.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".