Variations in Home Advantage: Evidence from the National Hockey League

We study two important aspects of the home advantage for ice hockey. First we study team and season level data to uncover systematic variation in the home advantage across teams and over time. We find no systematic variation in home advantage across teams. Secondly, we use six seasons of game-level data to uncover sources of the home advantage. Our results show that additional rest for the home team has no impact on the win-loss probability. We find evidence that the home teamâs rule advantage with regard to stick placement during face-offs helps to explain the home advantage, but that the home teamâs rule advantage with regard to last line change opportunity does not. We find that the home advantage varies over the progression of the season, being the highest at the beginning and end of the season, and very small in the middle of the season. We also find that the home advantage is larger at the end of the season when the two teams are high in the standings. Some of these results are consistent with referee bias, but we are unable to show a causal relationship between referee bias and these results.