Analysis of Home Teams Advantage in Turkish Basketball Super League with Bradley-Terry Model

The aim of this study is to investigate the effect of the status of being a home team on the basketball competition results in Turkish Basketball Super League by using Bradley-Terry model. Bradley-Terry model is a probability model that can analyze all pairwise comparisons and estimates the probability that the specific team is the winner in any sport competition. The main feature of this model is that it can be used for the analysis of competitions which are not ended in a draw. Recently, it has been frequently used especially to calculate the home advantage of team. The results of the competitions between men’s basketball teams of Be？ikta？ Gymnasium Club, Anadolu Efes, Fenerbah？e, Galatasaray, Türk Telekom and Kar？？yaka Sports Clubs in the Turkey Basketball Super League over 25 seasons between 1991-2016 were analyzed in this study. The data used in the study was obtained from the official website of Turkish Basketball League (TBL). The data was interpreted by both analyzing Bradley-Terry model and calculating frequency and percentage values in SAS 9.4 program. In total of 750 competitions between 6 teams, the team having the highest number of winnings is Anadolu Efes. On the other hand, Anadolu Efes and Türk Telekom are teams having the highest (82%) and lowest (50%) percentages, respectively, in terms of winning numbers for all competitions where they are home teams. In this study, in addition to calculate the winning probabilities of teams over all competition results, comments were also made by taking into account the home advantage of teams. It was concluded that the status of a home team has a significant effect of being the winner of the basketball competition. The probability of winning of the home team in Turkish Basketball Super League was found to be 63% by Bradley-Terry model