Rest, Back-to-Backs, Travel and Altitude: What the Data Shows

Schedule spots matter, but less than popular wisdom suggests. These are the effects our model learned from 2016-17 onward (excluding the bubble and limited-crowd seasons), holding team quality constant.

Back-to-backs

A team on the second night of a back-to-back loses roughly 1.5 to 2 points of margin. A road team on a back-to-back is the costlier case. A third game in four nights adds a little more.

Home court

Home teams won by about 1.6 to 2.5 points per game in 2022-23 to 2025-26 — smaller than the 3+ points of a decade ago. The model estimates it from recent seasons and sets it to zero on neutral floors such as NBA Cup games in Las Vegas and international games.

Travel and time zones

Distance since the previous game and time zones crossed have small effects, a fraction of a point for a typical trip. Eastward moves cost a little more than westward ones.

Altitude

Visitors in Denver and Salt Lake City fare about half a point worse than otherwise expected, on top of normal home court.

Every game page lists both teams' rest, travel and altitude situation and how much it moved the projection.

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