IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/bpj/jqsprt/v2y2006i1n5.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The Effects of Home-Away Sequencing on the Length of Best-of-Seven Game Playoff Series

Author

Listed:
  • Rump Christopher M

    (Bowling Green State University)

Abstract

We analyze the number of games played in a seven-game playoff series under various home-away sequences. In doing so, we employ a simple Bernoulli model of home-field advantage in which the outcome of each game in the series depends only on whether it is played at home or away with respect to a designated home team. Considering all such sequences that begin and end at home, we show that, in terms of the number of games played, there are four classes of stochastically different formats, including the popular 2-3 and 2-2 formats both currently used in National Basketball Association (NBA) playoffs. Characterizing the regions in parametric space that give rise to distinct stochastic and expected value orderings of series length among these four format classes, we then investigate where in this parametric space that teams actually play. An extensive analysis of historical 7-game playoff series data from the NBA reveals that this home-away model is preferable to the simpler, well-studied but ill-fitting binomial model that ignores home-field advantage. The model suggests that switching from the 2-2 series format used for most of the playoffs to the 2-3 format that has been used in the NBA Finals since a switch in 1985 would stochastically lengthen these playoff series, creating an expectation of approximately one extra game per playoff season. Such evidence should encourage television sponsors to lobby for a change of playoff format in order to garner additional television advertising revenues while reducing team and media travel costs.

Suggested Citation

  • Rump Christopher M, 2006. "The Effects of Home-Away Sequencing on the Length of Best-of-Seven Game Playoff Series," Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports, De Gruyter, vol. 2(1), pages 1-18, January.
    • Handle: RePEc:bpj:jqsprt:v:2:y:2006:i:1:n:5
    DOI: 10.2202/1559-0410.1011
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://doi.org/10.2202/1559-0410.1011
    Download Restriction: For access to full text, subscription to the journal or payment for the individual article is required.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.2202/1559-0410.1011?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Rump Christopher M, 2008. "Data Clustering for Fitting Parameters of a Markov Chain Model of Multi-Game Playoff Series," Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports, De Gruyter, vol. 4(1), pages 1-19, January.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bpj:jqsprt:v:2:y:2006:i:1:n:5. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Peter Golla (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.degruyter.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.