Home Court Advantage in Basketball - A Case Study of Žalgiris Kaunas Basketball Team

Abstract

The actual venue where a basketball game is played needs to be considered (Volossovitch 2017) when looking at the effectiveness of a team's performance playing in front of home crowd. Clarke (2005), Gomez and Pollard (2011) and Bray and Widmeyer (2008) explored the home court advantage topic and argued that this exists and is influenced by various factors (such as familiarity with environment, crowd support and loud arena, shooting percentages, absence of travel, etc.). A top division professional basketball team from Lithuania (Žalgiris Kaunas) was selected for this study using a convenience sample method (Veal and Darcy 2014). Similar to findings from literature, playing at home in front of full capacity crowd was beneficial for Žalgiris Kaunas, as their performances improved for all major statistical categories, alongside with being victorious in 11 out of the 19 home games that were scrutinised for the purpose of the research.