Inside Secrets of NBA Road Trips Sports Betting Jul 25, 2001, 19:01 By Ray Wild http://www.gamblingonlinemagazine.com

When it comes to NBA wagering, we're always on the lookout for an inside edge.  One of the issues we've studied extensively is road trips.  How do NBA teams fare after a three-, four-, or five-game road trip?

Intuitively, we would think that teams would become exhausted, and so more vunerable as the road game stretches on.  Stressful cab rides to the airport, sleeping slumped in your seat and high-fat restaurant meals would all contribut to tired, low-energy teams by the end of the road trip - an easy home cover, right?

And what about when you throw jet-lag into the picture?  One cliche  that has bounced around  for a while is that Eastern teams play poorly on their first home game after they return from a Western road swing.

One story illustrates the theory.  During the 1999-2000 season, the Detroit Pistons went through a five-game Western road swing, with stops in Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, Sacramento and Los Angeles.  It was a successful road trip:4-1 in the standings and a 3-2 at the sportsbook.  Their first game back, on March 29, 2000, they were 5.5 point favorites to the Charlotte Hornets.  But the Hornets came away with an "upset", beating the Pistons 98-91.

After the game, Detroit head coach George Irvine tried to explain to reporters why Detroit had played so poorly: "It's an old NBA cliche that the first game back from the coast is really tough.  But cliches get that way because there is some truth behind them.  We gave what we had, but the tank wasn't full."

As we said, we're always looking for an inside edge.  Irvine's statement stirred our interest.  Is there value in wagering against an Eastern team fresh back from a Western road trip?  Is it true that their "tank isn't full" and the 5.5 point favorite is, in fact, the weaker team that day?  If the cliche is true, perhaps we can use it to fatten our bankroll.  We had to find out for ourselves.

THE PROOF

To answer this question for you, we crunched through five years of NBA data, covering the regular and playoff games from 1995 to present. We discarded the 1999 season, which was shortened by the NBA strike and didn't include a statistically significant number of Western road swings by Eastern teams.  That left us with four years of data to consider.

We studied the performance of Eastern teams, which we defined as teams in the Eastern time zone - New York, New Jersey, Boston, Charlotte, Philadelphia, Miami, Orlando, Toronto, Washington, Atlanta, Detroit, Indiana, Milwaukee and Cleveland.  How did they perform against the spread after  a Western road swing?

Season          win-losses        units          betting against
2000               8-9           -1.9 units         +0.2 units   
1998               8-10          -3 units           +1.2 units
1997               5-12          -8.2 units         +6.5 units
1996               11-7          +3.3 units         -5.1 units

TOTAL              32-38

Over four seasons, the Eastern teams did exhibit a small tendency to fail against the spread after a Westen road swing.  The strategy of betting against the Eastern home team cashed out54.3% of the time.  But because the numbers are so small, we can't draw any significant conclusions.  Imagine if even one more Eastern team had covered.  The total ATS mark would be 33-37 for an overall break even system play betting on the visitor.

We also looked at various cross sections of the data.  Did it matter if the team was coming off a win or a loss?  Did it matter if they were favored in their return home game?  Did it matter if the opponent was a +.500 club or not?  Because we had such small numbers to start with we could not find any statistically significant results.

So, what did we learn?  At the very least, we knew that we would not jump at the chance to bet on an Eastern team just because thet had completed a Western road trip, they did fail to cover more often than not. But they didn't fail often enough to make it it worthy of our hard-won wagering profits.  If the cliche is true, it must also be  true that sports bettors already know which teams are exhausted form the road trip.

Whatever value we thought was there, had already been spotted by eagle-eyed sports investors.  It's still just a 5/50 bet.

Sometimes, having that knowledge is as good as having a winning system.  If our frind exhorts us to bet on the Eastern team because he's "heard" that Eastern teams struggle after returning from the coast, you'll know to keep your money safely in your pocket.  Sometimes, avoiding a stupid loss is as good as a win.