Denver's Home Field + Home Ice Advantage (NBA/NHL)

Previously I wrote on diminishing home court/home ice advantage in the NBA and NHL, and how this might not hurt teams as much as it used to for this season's abnormal neutral site playoff arrangement.

One exception to this might be the Denver Nuggets and Colorado Avalanche - both teams play in the Pepsi Center in Denver, at altitude. Previous studies have shown that Denver teams have a considerably higher home field advantage, but specifically I'm aiming to see how it will affect this season's playoffs.

Unfortunately, there isn't enough data to go off of for these two teams in just playoff games (Nuggets have had 30 home playoff games over the past 10 years; Avalanche have had 20). So I used a simple methodology to isolate each season's home advantage: subtracting each team's home margin minus their road margin, divided by 2. This removes the effect of each team's strength in each season (i.e. if a certain team is very strong both at home and on the road, the difference between the two is their actual home court advantage).


Over the past 10 seasons, the Nuggets have averaged a home court advantage of 2.48, which is slightly lower than the total NBA average of 2.91. The difference though is that the Nuggets' HFA has increased recently, countering the overall trend - 4.7 in 2019-20 (NBA average: 2.17) and 6.92 in 2018-19 (NBA average: 2.79).



The same pattern holds true for the Avalanche: averaging a home ice advantage of 0.24 goals over the past 10 seasons, vs the total NHL average of 0.28. Yet, their trend is going up recently: 0.37 in 2019-20 (NHL average: 0.24) and 0.302 in 2018-19 (NHL average 0.303).

In both cases, it does seem the Denver-based teams will lose more than the average team by missing out on home field advantage in this year's playoffs, with the Nuggets holding the 3 seed in the West and the Avalanche with the 2 seed.