The Top NBA Teams Have A Road-Court Advantage, Too

The Golden State Warriors already enjoy one of the best home-court advantages in the league, and with their recent title runs, they now often get to enjoy some home cooking while on the road as well. In general, during the NBA’s regular season the league’s best teams often enjoy a distinct road-court advantage in addition to out-manning their opponents most nights.

When Visitors Get Too Comfortable In Your House

Everyone loves a winner, so it shouldn’t have been surprising when during a Golden State at Memphis game last season, a loud cheer filled the FedEx Forum on the first basket of the game by the visiting team, a three-pointer by either Stephen Curry or Klay Thompson. This wasn’t a smattering of applause, it was an eruption. The Grizzlies’ players knew right away that there was no home court advantage to be had on that evening.

It was confusing for a split-second. The Grizzlies logo was at center court and the Warriors were wearing their road unis – which doesn’t really mean anything nowadays – but the building in Memphis, Tennessee had become inundated with folks cheering against the home team.

Now I’m no expert on population migration and folks are under no obligation to root for the local team, but it’s probably a safe bet that there aren’t many San Francisco/Oakland-area transplants living in the Memphis area.

But given the recent successes of the Warriors, their fan base has gone from a very devoted local one, to an ever-increasing national one, temporary as it may be.

This is nothing new. During the MagicJohnson/Larry Bird era  in the 1980’s, one could visit any city in the U.S. and spot folks wearing Lakers’ or Celtics’ jerseys and it continued during the Michael Jordan era with the sale of Chicago Bulls’ jerseys exploding globally.  It continued with the Shaq/Kobe dominance in Los Angeles in the early 2000’s and later with the Miami Heat championship runs.

Plenty Of Good Seats Available

Anyway, that night in Memphis it was clear that the Grizzlies’ home arena is one of several buildings in the NBA where popular visiting teams and their fans can, in large numbers, brazenly come in and put their feet up on the furniture and pop open a beer.

With the exception of those rare fan bases that will continue to support their team even during a series of losing campaigns, bad teams will usually see a decline in attendance and, with plenty of good seats available, will be ripe for invasion when the league’s current most popular flavors comes to town.

Take a city with a large transplant population like Atlanta, Georgia, where the hometown Hawks and their fans often experience the discomfort of – depending on the opponent – having home games instantly become road games without having boarded an airplane out of town.

Even back in the eighties and nineties, when the Hawks were fairly successful and Dominique Wilkins was flying all over the 17,000 seat Omni, they struggled to fill their own building – especially on weeknights and even during the postseason – unless a powerhouse like the Lakers, Bulls or Celtics came to town, or some of the many thousands of transplanted New Yorkers piled into the building to root for the Knicks. In those cases, the Hawks’ fans were usually challenged to get a little rowdy just so the place could at least have a neutral site feel to it.

In 1988, the single-game regular season attendance record of 62,046 was set for a game at Atlanta’s Georgia Dome – a football arena that was being used temporarily for basketball while Philips Arena was under construction – for a game between the Hawks and the Chicago Bulls with Michael Jordan. Take the “under” on how many of those in attendance – many of whom had an obstructed view of the court or were too far away from it to see anything – were there to see the Hawks, who were good back then.

Some Teams NEVER Enjoy A Home-Court Advantage

The nomadic Brooklyn Nets don’t really have a fan base, having moved from Long Island to Piscataway, East Rutherford and Newark, New Jersey before settling in Brooklyn while sharing a metro area with a more established Knicks’ franchise. As a result, the Nets continue to struggle to be taken seriously, even as their neighbors across the river have done little of substance on a basketball court for nearly two decades.

Even back-to-back trips to the NBA Finals in 2002 and 2003 have done little to win local fans over in large numbers.

So when the Warriors came to visit Brooklyn last December, it seemed a bit apropos that they were wearing their home whites while the Nets donned their road unis, and Nets’ announcer Ian Eagle felt compelled to mention how loud the Warrior fans had gotten as their heroes pulled away in the fourth quarter. Barclays Center had become Oracle Center East.

The Washington Wizards – their improved play in recent years notwithstanding – often suffer the same fate dating back to their days in Baltimore.

The Sacramento Kings suffer the most from the Warriors’ success these days, with their venue a short drive from the Bay Area, and plenty of seats available on game night due to the team’s poor showing in recent years. Perfect scenario for an invasion, although they enjoyed one of the best home-court situations in the NBA during the early 2000’s.

Even in buildings known for being almost totally partisan, like the ones in Boston, Portland, Oklahoma City, Salt Lake City and Toronto, fans of other teams can be found and heard.

And they always seem to find good seats.

Not In Our House

It must be demoralizing as a member of a team playing a scheduled home game against a superior team only to see the building decked out in the colors of the visiting opponent.

During the 2016-17 season, however, we witnessed a bit of a revolt during games where the Warriors were the visiting team. Arenas in Milwaukee, Sacramento, Philadelphia, and New York, among others, began using something called the “Bandwagon Cam” to embarrass folks wearing a Warriors’ jersey in their building by featuring them on the giant screen.

This phenomenon happens in all major sports. The Dallas Cowboys and Pittsburgh Steelers have huge fan bases nationwide going back to their dominance in the 1970’s and 1980’s; many of these fans have no shame about entering a hostile venue wearing the visiting team’s colors.

Wither The Long-Suffering Fan

So the long-suffering fan has to deal with their counterparts who change jerseys every 3-4 years while watching them invade their otherwise empty home arena to cheer on the visiting defending champ or contender, and if his/her team finally becomes a contender, watches cynically as the home building fills up nightly to support the home side and wonders where all the new enthusiasts emerged from all of a sudden.

It’s understandable. Tickets to sporting events are expensive, and when working out the annual entertainment budget, perhaps paying top dollar to see a poor product isn’t any more prudent than spending a tad less to not really see the game from the upper reaches.

The NBA has reached the level of popularity it has by marketing its star players. With a 30-team league in an era of player movement many of the top players are concentrated within a handful of teams, and the casual fans will flock to those teams while the majority scramble to become or remain relevant.

It’s an unbalanced, harsh reality and one the league doesn’t seem to mind.