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The Role Of Rest

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The “Role of Rest” study conducted by Oliver Entine and Dylan Small in 2007 provides insight into how playing games at home may provide an advantage. (CHANGE INTRO BASED ON CONTENT) Entine and Small drawn data from and analyzed the game results of the four major sports leagues in North America: National Football League (NFL), National Hockey League (NHL), Major League Baseball (MLB), and the NBA. As a result, Entine and Small found that NBA has the highest percentage for a home-team victory, sitting on the top of the list at 60.8% comparing to 58.1% from NFL, 55% from NHL, and 53.5% from MLB. Judging from the data, they conclude that the home advantage in basketball is the biggest of the four major American pro sports. They then began to investigate …show more content…

2) If the distribution of road team rest was set equal to the distribution of home team rest, how much of the home court advantage would go away? and 3) Does the length of time a team has been on a road trip have an effect above and beyond its rest?

Using a statistical model they created (See Appendix), Entine and Small ended up with the following results:

As shown above, with the assumption of all conditions being equal, a team playing a game the day right after the previous game is expected to score roughly 1.7719 points less than if that same team has more than three days of rest between games. Playing a game after only one day of rest, in contrast reduces the team’s scoring ability by only 0.1328 points to if the team had more than three days of rest. Oddly, the data also indicates that a team with two days of rest seems to actually be able to improve its scoring margin by 0.3236 points. However, as shown in the “P-value” column, the p-values are too great for the score estimations of the team playing another game after 1 or 2 days of rest, consisting of 0.8669 and 0.7040. On the other hand, the score estimation of the team playing another game without rest has a much smaller p-value (0.0322), indicating that the estimation of this variable is much more reliable and significant comparing to the others. Entine and Small then answered their first question: there seems to be a significant (albeit a small) negative effect to playing games on consecutive nights, but no further benefit of rest once the team has one or more days of

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