With this article, I will set a Stapled to the Bench record. While records are meant to be broken, this record will be hard to break.
This article is a follow-up to the recent Considering Takeaways article. Having figured out how to get counts on visiting team events as recorded by home-arena game statisticians, I looked for bias in those data. Specifically, I looked to see if a specific home-team game statistician had a bias against the visiting teams when recording events.
Arena Bias Against Visiting Teams
As far as I could tell, NO game statistician is biased against the visiting teams (or for the home team). Each statistic I looked at showed levels of bias against the statistic. For example, takeaways are recorded three times as much in one specific arena compared to another specific arena, but the high-takeaway arena has high takeaway counts for both the home and visiting teams, while the low-takeaway arena has low takeaway counts for both the home and visiting teams.
This was true for all of the “judgment” statistics: takeaways, giveaways, hits.
The only noticeable arena bias is in the way a game statistician records an event. A game statistician may be biased against takeaways but is never biased against the visiting teams.
There isn’t nearly enough data available to see if a specific game statistician is biased against a specific visiting team.
Summary
The STTB record I talked about? This is the shortest article I’ve written. I think some of the site introductions have been longer!
Related Articles