Does Home Ice Matter?
Every rink has a team that calls it home — same locker room, same walk to the bench, same parents yelling from the same seats. Whether any of that actually moves the final score, instead of just feeling like it should, is a question the schedule can settle.
The leaguewide split
Pool every finished regular-season game together and the home bench comes out ahead — a real gap, not rounding noise.
By tier
A single leaguewide number can't tell you whether the effect is the same at every level of competition. Split the same games out by tier and it isn't — the edge moves depending on who's playing.
| Tier | Games | Home win | Away win | Edge |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Other | 2895 | 48.6% | 42.7% | +5.9 |
| Upper Gold | 2085 | 46.7% | 43.4% | +3.3 |
| Platinum | 1587 | 45.2% | 39.9% | +5.3 |
| Gold | 1530 | 48.3% | 45.2% | +3.1 |
| Elite | 1293 | 45.4% | 44.2% | +1.2 |
| Gold Group 2 | 369 | 44.7% | 46.6% | -1.9 |
| Gold Group 1 | 251 | 41.0% | 45.8% | -4.8 |
Other leans on it hardest — a +5.9-point home edge across 2895 games. Gold Group 1 barely notices it: -4.8 points across 251 games, close enough to call a coin flip. That's a 10.7-point spread between tiers, too wide to be noise. What the win/loss count can't tell us is why: whether the crowd is helping an underdog steal a game, or just making it easier for the favorite to close one out. Each tier here is also a much smaller sample than the 10010-game leaguewide total above, so trust the direction of the gap more than its exact size.