Abstract
In the last decade of the 20th century, home advantage in the National Hockey League (NHL) fell by half, from 60% wins (or higher prior to 1991) to 55% wins, and has remained there until the present. This drop is much the largest and most abrupt of any change in home advantage in elite sports since the end of the Second World War. In addition, it is further complicated by two rule changes at the start of the decade. First, in 1991-1992 the NHL instituted instant video replay. Then the next year, 1992-1993, it imposed the instigator rule, which provided a game misconduct penalty (ejection from the game) for starting a fight and was followed by a prolonged drop in the frequency of fighting. Of the many theories of the home advantage, two are singled out as relevant to the fall in home advantage and possibly helpful in explaining it.
Highlights
The five major professional team sports for men in North America are baseball, football, hockey, basketball, and soccer.1 Teams in all five sports win more often at home than they do away, and the home advantage is statistically reliable year after year, stretching back in each sport at least to the Second World War (Pollard & Pollard, 2005)
The main purpose of this article is to test this hypothesis, that is, that it was the introduction of instant video replay that caused the steep decline in home advantage in the National Hockey League (NHL)
Home advantage in this article was taken from network sites: hockey-reference.com (NHL), who scored.com (English Premier League), pro-football reference. com (National Football League [NFL]), baseball-reference. com (Major League Baseball [MLB]), basketball-reference. com (National Basketball Association [NBA])
Summary
The five major professional team sports for men in North America are baseball, football, hockey, basketball, and soccer. Teams in all five sports win more often at home than they do away, and the home advantage is statistically reliable year after year, stretching back in each sport at least to the Second World War (Pollard & Pollard, 2005). The five major professional team sports for men in North America are baseball, football, hockey, basketball, and soccer.. Teams in all five sports win more often at home than they do away, and the home advantage is statistically reliable year after year, stretching back in each sport at least to the Second World War (Pollard & Pollard, 2005). The effect in baseball is smallest of the five, equaling close to 4% (the percentage of home wins minus 50%) for more than a century. It is highest in soccer and basketball, ranging in both sports as high as 15% just after the war, but declining slowly since, to a present level around 10%. Football has been slowly increasing since the war, roughly 3% in the same span of years
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