After watching a really sloppy first half of basketball between the Celtics and Spurs yesterday, I started thinking of something I’ve often wondered about – do NBA teams perform worse on certain days of the week or times of day? In NFL, West Coast teams playing early games on the East Coast and Thursday Night games are situations that we generally recognize as being suboptimal in DFS. But is there something like that in NBA too?
I applied a minimum minutes filter (10 or more minutes/game) and here’s the daily breakdown:
On Thursdays, there are generally only 2-4 games going on and most of the other teams are using it as a travel day. Thursday has by far the fewest results, but also the worst results in terms of Plus/Minus. When you breakdown Thursday contests using a “Days Between Games” filter, you can see that Thursday games are especially challenging when a team had played the previous day.
In fact, whereas the overall results for teams playing on a back to back (players averaging 10+ mins/game) is +0.41, the Plus/Minus on Thursday back to back games is almost two points lower:
Most teams will play a small number of Thursday games throughout the NBA season. Do they just get in a routine and when that changes, they underperform? At my wife’s old job, they worked a rotating schedule where one person worked (remote) each Saturday. I can tell you when it was her turn to work Saturday, she didn’t do a damn thing the entire shift. Whether you believe that narrative or not, there is a decent sample of results that says teams playing back to back on a Thursday do significantly worse than we would expect.
The next lowest Plus/Minus score came on Sunday. Breaking the games down by start time, there is a lull from 2:00-4:00 p.m. ET starts, then a spike at 5:00. The afternoon results overall are a little bit worse than the evening results, but not to the degree I was anticipating, to be honest.
There is one scenario to watch out for though. Playing on a second half of a back to back is usually challenging enough. But when the second game of the back to back starts in the afternoon rather than the evening, that makes it even more difficult. There is a pretty clear line of correlation based on start time in this category:
One last thing to consider – what happens when an East or West Coast team is playing on the other coast? I excluded home games from the results to make it fair and here were the results:
|
Time Zone |
Road vs same TZ |
Road vs other TZ |
|
Pacific Standard Time |
+0.13 |
+0.17 |
|
Eastern Standard Time |
+0.27 |
+0.08 |
There’s been a significant talent gap between the West and East for several years now and I think that’s what is really showing up in the results. But since that is what’s showing up in the results, I think we can then conclude that a 7:30 pm ET road game isn’t much different than a 10:30 pm ET road game with all other factors equal.
So does the day of the week or the time of day matter in NBA? In some instances, I say yes. Players playing in the second game of the back to back set on a Thursday night or Sunday afternoon have historically underperformed by a noticeable amount.
