How Sports are (Analytically) Different in the Bubble

Most of the world’s major sports have resumed, or will pick up again soon, in some form or other. But a lot is different, with most leagues forming one or more bubbles, often excluding fans, limiting travel, and tweaking things like officiating rules to better maintain social distance.

Many of these changes have second-order effects. For instance, the “Cincinnati” tennis event requires that players fetch their own towels–which probably slows down play–but has no fans–which could accelerate it. We’ll soon have enough data to draw some preliminary conclusions about the overall effect of the new rules on pace of play.

Some of the issues that arise when a league moves into a bubble apply across sports, like home-court advantage. With that in mind, I’m gathering evidence of how sports are playing differently in our time of social distance. I’ll try to keep this post updated as we learn more. The comments are open, so you can contribute any demonstrated effects that I haven’t listed here. (Or similar effects in other sports.) You can also tweet at me.

Baseball

So far, home-field advantage is almost non-existent. Historically, home teams win about 54% of games.

Basketball

NBA offenses can’t stop scoring. Refs are calling more fouls, and fewer off-court distractions get in the way of making shots.

The WNBA is showing the effects of a league full of fresh legs, and has displayed a record-setting pace of play. And despite playing on the same court every night, there is a marked home-court advantage.

Hockey

Fighting is up! Lucky NHLers–most of us don’t go to work where it’s culturally acceptable to hit people.

Soccer

Home-field advantage is reduced, but it still exists, even behind closed doors. A recent paper (summary / PDF) notes that refs have been more lenient than usual toward away teams. That tallies with long-held conventional wisdom that home-advantage stems from officiating bias, which is driven by noisy, partisan crowds.

Speaking of officiating, refs were more likely to grant penalty kicks, but despite the quieter environment, penalties aren’t converted any more often.

For more detail on home-field advantage in various leagues since the restart, here is a valuable Twitter thread from @recspecs730.

Tennis

I’m keeping tabs on whether match results are less predictable than usual. (They are, but we haven’t really seen enough to be sure.) Other than that, it’s still speculation. We’ll know more after “Cincinnati,” and much more after the US Open.

How Argentina’s Road Warriors Defied the Davis Cup Home-Court Odds

Italian translation at settesei.it

The conventional wisdom has long held that there is a home court advantage in Davis Cup. It makes sense: In almost every sport, there is a documented advantage to playing at home, and Davis Cup gives us what seem to be the most extreme home courts in tennis.

However, Argentina won this year’s competition despite playing all four of their ties on the road. After the first round this season, only one of seven hosts managed to give the home crowd a victory. Bob Bryan has some ideas as to why:

https://twitter.com/Bryanbros/status/803244964784308227

Which is it? Do players excel in front of an enthusiastic home crowd, on a surface chosen for their advantage? Or do they suffer from the distractions that Bryan cites?

To answer that question, I looked at 322 Davis Cup ties, encompassing all World Group and World Group Play-off weekends back to 2003. Of those, the home side won 196, of 60.9% of the time. So far, the conventional wisdom looks pretty good.

But we need to do more. To check whether the hosting teams were actually better, meaning that they should have won more ties regardless of venue, I used singles and doubles Elo ratings to simulate every match of every one of those ties. (In cases where the tie was decided before the fourth or fifth rubber, I simulated matches between the best available players who could have contested those matches.) Based on those simulations, the hosts “should” have won 171 of the 322 ties, or 53.1%.

The evidence in favor of home-court advantage–and against Bryan’s “distractions” theory–is strong. Home sides have won World Group ties about 15% more often than we would expect. Some of that is likely due to the hosts’ ability to choose surface. I doubt surface accounts for the whole effect, since some court types (like the medium-slow hard court in Croatia last weekend) don’t heavily favor either side, and many ties are rather lopsided regardless of surface. Teasing out the surface advantage from the more intangible home-court edge is a worthy subject to study, but I won’t be going any further in that direction today.

If distractions are a danger to hosts, we might expect see the home court advantage erode in later rounds. Many early-round matchups are minor news events compared to semifinals and finals. (On the other hand, there were over 100 representatives of the Argentinian press in Croatia last weekend, so the effect isn’t entirely straightforward.) The following table shows how home sides have fared in each round:

Round         Ties  Home Win %  Wins/Exp  
First Round    112       58.9%      1.11  
Quarterfinal    56       60.7%      1.16  
Semifinal       28       82.1%      1.30  
Final           14       57.1%      1.14  
Play-off       112       58.9%      1.14

Aside from a blip at the semifinal level, home-court advantage is quite consistent from one round to the next. The “Wins/Exp” shows how much better the hosts fared than my simulations would have predicted; for instance, in first-round encounters, hosts won 11% more ties than expected.

There is also no meaningful difference between home court advantage on day one and day three. The hosts’s singles players win 15% more matches than my simulations would expect on day one, and 15% more on day three. The day three divide is intriguing: Home players win the fourth rubber 12% more often than expected, but they claim the deciding fifth rubber a whopping 23% more frequently than they would in neutral environments. However, only 91 of the 322 ties involved five live rubbers, so the extreme home advantage in the deciding match may just be nothing more than a random spike.

The doubles rubber is less likely to be influenced by venue. Compared to the 15% advantage enjoyed by World Group singles players, the hosting side’s doubles pairings win only 6% more often than expected. This again raises the issue of surface: Not only are doubles results less influenced by court speed than singles results, but home sides are less likely to choose a surface based on the desire of their doubles team, if that preference clashes with the needs of their singles players.

Argentina on the road

In the sense that they never played at home or chose a surface, Argentina beat the odds in all four rounds this year. Of course, home court advantage can only take you so far; it helps to have a good squad. My simulations indicate that the Argentines had a nearly 4-in-5 chance of defeating their Polish first-round opponents on neutral ground, while Juan Martin del Potro and company had a more modest 59% chance of beating the Italians in Italy.

For the last two rounds, though, the Argentines were fighting an uphill battle. The semifinal venue in Glasglow didn’t matter much; the prospect of facing the Murray brothers meant Argentina had less than a 10% chance of advancing no matter what the location. And as I wrote last week, Croatia was rightfully favored in the final. Playing yet another tie on the road simply made the task more difficult.

Once we adjust my simulations of each tie for home court advantage, it turns out that Argentina’s chances of winning the Cup this year were less than 1%, barely 1 in 200. The following table shows the last 14 winners, along with the number of ties they played at home and their chances of winning the Cup in my simulations, given which countries they ended up facing and the players who turned up for each tie:

Year  Winner  Home Ties  Win Prob  
2016  ARG             0      0.5%  
2015  GBR             3     18.9%  
2014  SUI             2     54.7%  
2013  CZE             1     10.5%  
2012  CZE             3     19.7%  
2011  ESP             2     12.2%  
2010  SRB             3     17.6%  
2009  ESP             4     44.0%  
2008  ESP             1     14.3%  
2007  USA             2     24.4%  
2006  RUS             2      1.7%  
2005  CRO             2      7.4%  
2004  ESP             3     23.8%  
2003  AUS             3     15.9%

In the time span I’ve studied, only the 2006 Russian squad managed anything close to the same season-long series of upsets. (I don’t yet have adequate doubles data to analyze earlier Davis Cup competitions.)  At the other end of the spectrum, the simulations emphasize how smoothly Switzerland swept through the bracket in 2014. A wide-open draw, together with Roger Federer, certainly helps.

It was tough going for Argentina, and the luck of the home-court draw made it tougher. Without a solid #2 singles player or an elite doubles specialist, it isn’t likely to get much easier. For all that, they’ll open the 2017 Davis Cup campaign against Italy with at least one unfamiliar weapon in their arsenal: They finally get to play a tie at home.