Home sweet home? In Cleveland and Oakland, yes… but not in many other places.
The NBA we see today is not a place where home-court dates lead to happy fans leaving an arena’s gates. This is not a new revelation. However, the extent to which the young season has reaffirmed this truth might come as a bit of a surprise.
On this, the afternoon of November 10, most NBA teams have played six or seven games. Nine is the high end (Atlanta at 7-2) and five is the low end (Boston at 2-3), but most teams have played six or seven games, maybe eight. That’s not a whole lot. Given the balance between home and road dates, most teams have not played six or seven home games, but they’ve certainly played more than two, with a few exceptions.
Yet, here we are: Just two weeks into the season — we have about 75 of these puppies left, folks — only two teams with more than two home games under their belts are still unblemished in their own buildings. Those two teams happen to be the participants in the 2015 NBA Finals, the Cleveland Cavaliers and the Golden State Warriors.
We are conditioned to think — and it’s not even wrong, either — that the best teams win on the road. Winning at home is supposed to be easier (and it is), but it’s not THAT much easier. In many ways, it could be that the best teams erect a fortress at home instead of (merely) being moderately good.
Only two teams other than the Cavs and Dubs are unbeaten at home on the afternoon of Nov. 10, before Tuesday night’s tip-offs. The San Antonio Spurs and Toronto Raptors share that distinction, but they’re both 2-0 at home; they’ve barely played a lick in their own arenas. That’s a bit of an eyebrow-raiser for those who — not too long ago — recalled how well the Utah Jazz played in the Delta Center (who cares about the new name of the arena — it will always be the Delta Center to me), or how tough it was to knock out the Blazers in Portland, or how formidable a good Denver Nugget team could be in the Mile High City.
Home might be where the heart is, but it’s not where NBA dominance lies, and as much as Tom Haberstroh and others have documented this shift in the league over time, it still gives one pause that 26 home courts have already been conquered by visitors this season, with two other buildings registering barely any home dates.
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Monday night, it’s true that the Atlanta Hawks — having to deal with a “4-in-5” from Nov. 3-7 — were playing a fifth game in seven nights. Yet, they were at home, where they were the second-best team in the league last season, at 35-6. (Golden State went 39-2 at home last season.) The Minnesota Timberwolves are going to be really good in a few years, barring injuries, but they’re not supposed to be all that good right now.
Fatigue certainly had something to do with the outcome, but Philips Arena couldn’t do enough for the Hawks in a 10-point loss to the T-Wolves. No, not every team plays a home game against a generally inferior club at the back end of a “5-in-7” stretch, so in that case, Minnesota-Atlanta might not rate as a representative example of the decline of home-court advantage in the league. Yet, isn’t a home building precisely the reason why a good team would be able to power through fatigue and fend off a younger and less experienced opponent? Home-court advantage didn’t provide the safety net it might have offered in previous decades.
Let’s see how much home-court identities and results are shaped (or not shaped) in the remaining 75 games of this NBA regular season.
