Why I won’t give up on Washington (or Kentucky)
by Ken Pomeroy on Friday, February 25, 2011
For ever and ever, analysts have put an emphasis on a team’s performance on the road when evaluating them. But is there such a thing as an otherwise great team being inherently bad on the road, even when taking home-court advantage into account? I don’t know the answer to that nor, I suspect, does anybody else. Oh you might think you know, but I’d like to suggest those people reconsider this idea.
Don’t get me wrong, teams that play well on the road are generally going to be very good teams. That’s why one can predict a team’s home performance pretty well based on its work on the road. (More with respect to scoring margin than W-L record, though. Last season there was correlation of 0.39 between D-I teams’ home and road winning percentage. There was a correlation of 0.54 between their home and road scoring margin. This shouldn’t be…