Something happened last week, after Damian Lillard fired a 33-foot jump shot that hit the back of the hoop, bounced 18 feet into the air and then launched as a guided missile straight down, passing through the net for a 1:29 home run. went on the Portland Trail Blazers game against the Dallas Mavericks.
Nothing. Nothing happened.
No cacophonous roar. No roar of thunderous gasps. No camera runs through a sea of surprised or cheerful faces, with his mouth open, his hands on his cheeks, his eyes wide open. Just a handful of exuberant screams from Lillard’s teammates at the Portland bank.
“Like any other plan, to be honest,” the Mavericks base, Seth Curry, recalls with a laugh. “You can hear them getting excited and shouting their bench. Our look of the box is silent. It’s just driving and making a tray.
Read it again. One of the craziest and most miraculous moves of this NBA season, devil, of any season, has had all the effect on ofArray… a tray.
That’s life in the NBA bubble: a mystical, parallel size in which basketball takes position, screaming fans, rotating dance groups or T-shirt guns, no kissing cameras or dance cameras or pets, any atmosphere sensation.
“It’s a little strange,” says Ian Eagle of TNT, who called this game Blazers-Mavericks and whose noisy reaction: “Ohhh-ho-hooo !!! REE-diculeux !!!” – probably the loudest in the building.
The coronavirus pandemic eliminated equation enthusiasts and forced the NBA to create a sterile and clean environment on the Disney Wide World of Sports campus near Orlando, Florida.
So the playoffs that have just begun will come with the same old narratives: Can LeBron claim the throne? Can the Raptors rehearse? Does Giannis have enough help? – and a new colossal curiosity.
What happens when there is no merit on the ground? When 20, 000 screaming souls are erased from the image? When there is no one to brighten up a player’s good fortune and complain about his failures? When there’s no booing, teasing or lightning?
To borrow a Confucian request: what is the sound of a null applause?
“It’s very different,” rockets base Eric Gordon said. “Enthusiasts bring other energy, which we don’t have. Array.. You have to create and create your own energy.”
The NBA has the merit in the widest field among Primary Sports in North America, with the home team winning 56 to 58% of all games in a given season. In the playoffs, it’s even harder, with the home team winning 65% of all games since 1984.
Determine why it has long been a source of fascination for coaches, players, coaches, psychologists, economists, statisticians and, well, for everyone.
In the NBA, No. 1 seed won 67 of the 72 first-round series (93%) since 1984. No. 2 seed also won 67 of the 72 first-round series in that period, while No. 3 seed won 75% of the time.
This is a league prone to agitation or surprise, especially in the first two rounds of the playoffs.
When a more sensible seed loses a house game, it makes up for it with a victory on the road, as smart groups do. And when a more sensible seed goes up 2-0 in a series, it’s because it was the most productive team, that’s how they won the most sensible seed, and not just because the games went home.
The “advantage” thus discussed is truly Game 7, the tiebreaker of the series. There have been 135 in NBA history, 78.5% of them have been won through the home team. Any series that ends in six games or less is literally about the talent disparity, not the location of the games.
The final went to a seventh game only 19 times, the house team won 15. But again, maybe it’s just because they were the most productive teams. Four of the last five NBA champions have won their titles as visitors.
A dominant team wants credit in the box. Golden State went 16-1 to win the 2017 championship, his only loss to Cleveland in the fourth game of the Finals. The 2001 Lakers also lost only once in the direction of the title, losing the first game of the home final before crushing Philadelphia.
However, if skill were the only factor, then the most productive seeds would probably wipe out the entire series. They don’t. The merit of the house box is obviously a factor.
So what happens now, when no one has to board a flight, sleep in a bed, or submit to the comic taste of Drunken Hedge Fund Guy in the $1,000 base seats?
“I think what happens maybe is that the most productive team will earn more in this environment,” said Rockets coach Mike D’Antoni. “They probably wouldn’t be affected by altitude, noise, crowd and all that.”
This may also mean that all old trends are now debatable. Down 2-0 might not seem intimidating, even if a team leading 2-0 wins the series 93% of the time, as all games now feel the same. Perhaps we’ll even see the first setback of a 3-0 deficit.
Conventional wisdom about the “intensity of the playoffs” can also take a hit. Players say it’s another game. Young players find it difficult to adapt. But much of this intensity comes from deafening crowds. In an antiseptic bubble, age might not be important, which would allow a younger team like Dallas, led by Luka Doncic, 21, to shine.
The games in the bubble are so quiet that participants can hear everything: players joke, coaches bark instructions, referees give lectures. The TV screens convey the noise of the canned crowd, but the delight in the sand “feels absolutely different,” Says Curry.
“It’s a completely different feeling when you’re playing,” Curry said. “It’s just quiet, man. You can hear everyone talking and screaming. You don’t get much of a sense of the look of television. And, to be honest, you get a little more audience noise on TV than when you play.”
In general, the most productive house records in a given season are the most productive groups: they are players, not fanatics. The only groups that have shown their merit inherent to the house are the altitude groups: Denver (5,280 ft) and Utah (4,226).
Across the league, groups of visitors shoot 1% less well than at home and are summoned for one more foul. This equates to a disadvantage of approximately three points consistent with the game. But the shootings, the ball losses and almost all other measures are consistent.
The team’s home win percentage in the NBA had ranged from 58 to 60%, but has declined in the last seven or 8 years, reaching 56-58% lately. Some of that may be attributed to programming reform, with the league cutting the number of consecutive matches and giving the groups more rest between games.
Still, league officials say the merit of the house has been exaggerated, noting that groups of visitors play the moment in a row at night, as opposed to groups based on resting houses. In those cases, it is the calendar, not the place, the cause of the loss.
The percentage of team home wins is reduced through five issues (to about 5%) in cases where the house team played the night before and the away team did not, according to league officials. Conversely, if the house team rests and the away team does not, the team house earns a higher percentage through five percentage points up to 63%.
Each exam comes to a different conclusion.
A 2007 investigation from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania decided that away team fatigue was “a vital factor” (but not a “dominant factor”) of the NBA’s edge advantage in the field.
The Scorecasting e-book, published in 2011, has almost completely eliminated fatigue as well as crowd noise effects on teams. In fact, the authors decided that it is the referees, not the players, who are unconsciously affected by the environment.
“It’s not the referees looking to respond to the crowd,” says Scorecasting co-author Tobias Moskowitz, a professor of finance and economics at Yale University. “It’s a subconscious bias. It is a trend based on herbs as a human the need to alleviate the social tension of 20,000 screaming fans.”
It’s true that crowds drive players crazy, Moskowitz says, but necessarily to gain advantages from the house team. “They inflate players from both sides,” he said. “Adrenaline is the genuine effect.”
League officials question the concept that referees are influenced by the crowd. Perhaps those fanless playoff games will provide a situation to solve the debate.
“I think the merit on the court will diminish,” Moskowitz said. “What we discovered is that enthusiasts tend to influence referees, especially closed calls; and without the enthusiasts out there … I think what you’ll see is that the calls are much more uniform and less biased towards the home team. “
Some analysts have speculated that the unbiased site may be just a draw, that smaller groups will have a better chance if, for example, they don’t have to play in Milwaukee (where the Bucks were 30-5), or the Clippers (27-9).
But if D’Antoni is right, the most productive groups may be even more dominant in bubble games. This would mean shorter series in all spaces and more scans.
In other words: if the way to defeat LeBron James and Anthony Davis is to exhaust them with long flights and time zone changes, then no one has a chance in this environment.
Brian Levenson, an intellectual functionality coach who works with NBA players and has written his master’s thesis on the home box advantage, believes that functionality comes down to an undeniable concept: aggression.
“I would say that the players I interviewed felt that the crowd is the ultimate vital factor,” Levenson said. But the detail of the house/road is more complicated.
A veteran who has thrived on away games told Levenson: “On the road, I’m more aggressive. They gave me the green light. I don’t worry about my circle of family or friends, or other people who ask for tickets, or my contract and respecting my contract.” However, some other player spoke of that same confidence in house games, saying that the presence of the circle of family and friends and a multitude of aids made him more aggressive.
All of this suggests that trust and functionality have more to do with how a player translates their environment, the environment itself.
“I think accepting how true comes from the way we communicate with each other and from the discussion we have with ourselves,” Levenson said.
Some stars appreciate the silence of hostile fans. Think of Reggie Miller at Madison Square Garden in the 1990s, or Kobe Bryant in Sacramento in the early 2000s, or Lillard, well, anywhere.
This even applies to some actors like Curry. His 3 memorable top games and nine of his thirteen sensitive highs came here along the way. The average score and the percentage of shots of his career are also higher on the road.
“I miss the enthusiasts and the power in the sand, the cheers and the crowd,” Curry said of the bubble games. “People even yell at me. I don’t want to calm down a fan who only talks to me about the game.”
Closing the hateful is so ingrained in the player’s psyche that Lillard, seconds after the Blazers ended their victory over the Mavericks last week, he left and shouted, Respect my name!
Technically, it was a house game in Dallas. But there was still none of the markers, some hounds and virtual fanatics, who couldn’t hear it.
Howard Beck, senior editor of the Bleacher Report, has covered the NBA full-time since 1997, adding seven years to the Lakers’ pace for the Los Angeles Daily News and nine years as editor of The New York Times. His policy was revered through the editors of the Associated Press in 2016 and 2017, and through the Association of Professional Basketball Writers in 2018.
Beck also introduces the podcast The Full 48, available on iTunes.
Follow him on Twitter, @HowardBeck.
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