Abstract
On March 11th, 2020, the National Basketball Association (NBA) paused its season after ~ 64 games due to the Coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak, only to resume ~ 5 months later with the top 22 teams isolated together (known as the “bubble”) in Orlando, Florida to play eight games each as an end to the regular season. This restart, with no new travel by teams, provided a natural experiment whereby the impact of travel and home-court advantage could be systematically examined. We show here that in the pre-COVID-19 regular season, traveling across time zones reduces winning percentage, team shooting accuracy, and turnover percentage, whereas traveling in general reduces offensive rebounding and increases the number of points the opposing (home) team scores. Moreover, we demonstrate that competition in a scenario where no teams travel (restart bubble) reduces the typical effects of travel and home-court advantage on winning percentage, shooting accuracy, and rebounding. Thus, home-court advantage in professional basketball appears to be linked with the away team’s impaired shooting accuracy (i.e., movement precision) and rebounding, which may be separately influenced by either circadian disruption or the general effect of travel, as these differences manifest differently when teams travel within or across multiple time zones.
Highlights
The internal circadian clock dictates the daily timing of changes in physiology and behavior, and has been found to impact even high-level activities such as athletic p erformance[1,2]
To uncover the specific impact of travel and time zone changes on in-game athletic performance, we examined how four previously-determined key factors to winning[14,15] differed when a team traveled from their home location to locations within and across time zones as well as between travel within the team’s home time zone to travel to other time zones
Using the natural experiment provided by the National Basketball Association (NBA) COVID-19 shut-down and subsequent bubble restart, we could systematically examine which aspects of regular season team performance changed when teams were traveling within and across time zones, and when no teams traveled
Summary
The internal circadian clock dictates the daily timing of changes in physiology and behavior, and has been found to impact even high-level activities such as athletic p erformance[1,2]. On March 11th, 2020, the National Basketball Association (NBA) paused its 2019–2020 season after ~ 64 games due to the novel Coronavirus 2019 (COVID19) outbreak, only to resume ~ 5 months later with the top 22 teams isolated together in Orlando, Florida to play eight games each as an end to the regular season By creating this “bubble,” the NBA generated a natural experiment whereby the impact of travel and time zone changes (which can cause circadian disruption) could be systematically teased apart. The frequent travel within and between time zones required of players across the NBA season (6+ months) can both chronically and acutely disrupt sleep and circadian rhythms These disruptions are likely to affect game playing performance and winning percentage to varying magnitudes at different points across the season, depending on the team’s recent stability (home games) or disruption (away games) in their schedule. Utilizing the unique context of the 2019–2020 NBA season, we aimed to examine how travel and time zone changes affect team regular season winning and athletic performance
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