Is Home Advantage Important for Success in the NHL?

Having home advantage, specifically in the playoffs, is seen as an important step towards winning the Stanley Cup. Having your home fans behind your back can provide an extra boost for your team. But do teams with a good home advantage succeed more?

To begin, home advantage here is defined as the percentage of home wins divided by percentage of away wins. So, a team with a big home advantage should have a value greater than 1, meaning they win more games at home than away. Teams with poor home advantage will have a value less than 1.

The following tables provide the home advantage data for the top 5 and lower 5 teams. In the past season, one of the worst teams in the league with a record of 16-25-7 had the best home advantage in the league, winning 3 times more games at home than on the road. In fact, of the top 5 only 1 of teams made the playoffs, Los Angeles. The others did rather poorly, finishing in the bottom of the league in terms of wins. 

Looking at the teams with the worst home advantage, 3 of the lower 5 made the playoffs with Edmonton and Carolina missing out, 2 teams that arguably had the potential to make the playoffs.

Looking at the past 5 years, on average 1.2 teams from the top 5 made the playoffs, while 2.6 from the bottom five made the playoffs. It might seem that home advantage is not all that important looking at this. When all observations are plotted, there is a clear downward trend, but one noticeable trend, is that all Stanley Cup champions (Not just those that made the playoffs) lie at or above 1.0 in terms home advantage other than the Boston Bruins in 2010. They also, unsurprisingly, lie above 1.0 in terms of points per game. The black box in the following graph surrounds every Stanley Cup champion over the past 23 years.

I quickly ran a regression with points per game as the dependent variables and the home advantage variable as the dependent variable. As expected, there is a negative significant relationship. The bigger your home advantage, the lower your points per game. That is, a 1 unit increase in your home advantage variable lowers your points per game by 0.09. While not too substantial, it is still something that should be taken into consideration.

The lesson here, is that it is important to have a nice balance between home wins and away wins, while being able to win at home with your fan base behind you when needed. That is, having a slight home advantage is ideal, with those with too much of a home advantage failing to win on the road and making any substantial progress towards the Stanley Cup.