The goal today is to determine whether NBA fantasy production has varied in road games this season, as opposed to home games, the direction of the variance (positive or negative), how large the variance is, and whether it affects all categories equally. The sample size is the entire 2016-17 season to date (minus players who fall short of the games- and minutes-played threshold), a large enough pool of data to draw conclusions with confidence.
The impact of road/home prouction is one variable in your team’s fantasy value, along with overall opponent matchups, matchups by position, thinking ahead to fantasy playoff schedules, knowing where you stand on ‘streaming’, and more. We won’t only be taking the meta-view, however, as I’ll also be discussing individual players who fare the best and worst when hitting the road – Elfrid Payton has been a true road warrior, roughly doubling his 9-cat value while traveling, but you may want to jettison Emmanuel Mudiay when he’s outside the familiar confines of the Pepsi Center.
If you’re most interested in how players have fared at home vs. away, click here for the spreadsheet.
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Home & Away Splits
There were 256 players who met the qualifying minimum of five games played and at least 15 minutes per game (for both home and away games). I first ran the numbers for that group and trimmed it to the top-200 players, as judged by 9-cat value at home. The reason I trimmed it was to better reflect the realities of standard fantasy leagues, most of which have about 200 players in the mix between active rosters, IR spots and the waiver wire. This is the average stat line for home games:
13.42 points (47.2% FGs, 75.3% FTs), 1.23 threes, 5.41 rebounds, 2.84 assists, 0.98 steals, 0.62 blocks, and 1.60 turnovers
I did the same top-200 trim for players using 9-cat away values. This is the average stat line for the away games:
13.04 points (45.8% FGs, 76.0% FTs), 1.16 threes, 5.18 rebounds, 2.64 assists, 0.94 steals, 0.58 blocks, and 1.61 turnovers.
Compare those two lines and you’ll see that the road numbers dip in every category except FT%. The differences aren’t huge, but over such a big sample size (200 players who have played an average of 12.97 home games and 12.89 away games), that adds up to a lot of missing production.
Part of this might be due to scorekeepers being more lenient (perhaps unconsciously) toward the home team, but the more obvious factor is the rigors of traveling. Broken sleep patterns, back-to-back games in different cities, hostile crowds, cramped locker rooms...it all adds up. Whatever the case, we can already see the effect on statistical production.
Before moving forward, I wanted to mention one interesting fact that jumped out at me -- Joel Embiid didn’t meet the minimum qualifications for today’s analysis. The reason why? He’s played in a mere three road games all season. Six of his nine DNPs have come away from Philly, which is something his owners should be mindful of going forward.
Quantifying Player Values
The next step was to quantify the results, to the best of my ability. For this section, I stuck with the original pool of 256 qualifying players. If you’re curious about my home-brewed methodology to arrive at the numbers below, feel free to send me an email or a message on Twitter. Most readers don’t care how the sausage is made, so I’ll skip the interim steps.
The result is two lists showing what percentage of their value a player gained or lost when playing on the road this season. After normalizing the data to account for a few wild outliers, we’re left with a clear picture -- on average, players have produced 15.90% less fantasy value in 9-cat leagues while playing on the road this season. In 8-cat leagues, that increases slightly to negative 16.13%. The percentages would shift if you changed the sample size (e.g. 150 players instead of 256 players), and I’ll stress that I’m not a statistician (there might be some noise in the data), but we can still confidently reject the null hypothesis that home/road splits do not impact fantasy values.
For 9-cat purposes, the loss leader is Emmanuel Mudiay. Take a gander at his home/away splits this season:
| Home | Road |
Games | 13 | 15 |
Minutes | 31.8 | 27.8 |
Points | 14.5 | 11.4 |
FG% | 42.0% | 32.2% |
FT% | 75.8% | 79.0% |
3-pointers | 1.6 | 0.8 |
Rebounds | 4.8 | 3.7 |
Assists | 5.3 | 2.5 |
Blocks | 0.2 | 0.3 |
Steals | 0.9 | 0.7 |
Turnovers | 2.5 | 3.1 |
Other ‘roadkill’ candidates include Aron Baynes, Kelly Oubre, Isaiah Whiteside, Marquese Chriss, Dorian Finney-Smith, Sean Kilpatrick and Monta Ellis. Of the bigger-name players who are struggling on the road, we find Jrue Holiday (-55.7% in 9-cat), Goran Dragic, Jabari Parker, Klay Thompson, Greg Monroe, Thaddeus Young, Derrick Rose, Andre Drummond, Anthony Davis and Nikola Jokic, all of whom are posting at least 33% less value on the road this season. Davis’ dip in terms of cumulative z-scores (rather than percentage of value) is the greatest of all, which makes sense when you look at his splits:
| Home | Road |
Games | 15 | 13 |
Minutes | 39.3 | 35.2 |
Points | 34.1 | 24.5 |
FG% | 50.4% | 46.6% |
FT% | 82.9% | 77.7% |
3-pointers | 0.8 | 0.3 |
Rebounds | 12.5 | 9.4 |
Assists | 2.5 | 1.8 |
Blocks | 2.9 | 2.5 |
Steals | 1.9 | 0.9 |
Turnovers | 2.6 | 2.3 |
Season-long owners are obviously going to play him regardless of the opponent or any other consideration, if he’s healthy, but his road struggles are something to consider before breaking the bank for him in DFS leagues.
At the other end of the spectrum, we find guys like Buddy Hield, Dario Saric and Rodney Stuckey faring much better on the road this season. Someone who really jumps out is Elfrid Payton, who has been far superior in away games this year:
| Home | Road |
Games | 15 | 15 |
Minutes | 27.5 | 29.9 |
Points | 9.7 | 12.9 |
FG% | 40.1% | 50.3% |
FT% | 68.6% | 55.3% |
3-pointers | 0.3 | 0.7 |
Rebounds | 3.6 | 3.7 |
Assists | 4.9 | 6.4 |
Blocks | 0.5 | 0.7 |
Steals | 0.7 | 1.6 |
Turnovers | 2.1 | 1.7 |
Other key road warriors include Derrick Favors (albeit in limited action), Seth Curry, Serge Ibaka, Devin Booker, Markieff Morris, Jusuf Nurkic, Avery Bradley, Rudy Gay, Danilo Gallinari and Jonas Valanciunas. In the end, though, only 74 of the 256 players under consideration have gained value on the road this season.
Having established the general trend of superior production in home games, it’s important to take a few minutes and survey where the players on your team(s) fit into the picture. You might be pleasantly surprised to find that some of them improve when traveling, or don’t see a substantial difference. Or you might learn that an upcoming road trip is likely to spell trouble for your superstar -- either way, it’s better to be informed. Click here to view the entire list of players with 9-cat and 8-cat values, as well as the differences expressed as percentages. You can also download the sheet by going under the ‘File’ tab, and then ‘Download’. If you ever want to just dig around the raw data, I recommend NBA.com, Basketball Monster and Basketball Reference, among others. As usual, let me know if you have any questions or insights based on today’s column. Good luck this week!
