For this season, through december 15th, the 2nd game of a back to back makes a team 3.5 points worst. In other words, the best teams are still good, but on the 2nd game of back to back, particularly on the road, they become much closer to average. Making them beatable.

Its far worse for the 4th game in 5 nights. ON those nights, a team is 8 points worse. Again, more on the road. So basically, a team should lose to just about any but the worst teams if they are on the road.

Meaning, that the schedule gods can have a HUGE impact on the standings. That the day the Circus or a concert is scheduled at your arena could block out a night, that would in turn force the schedule to create multiple 4 game in 5 nights situation and possibly cost a playoff seeding !

As it turns out, I ran a similar analysis last month, drawing different conclusions for these types of games:

Net Point Disadvantages (2001-02 through 2004-05 seasons)

In my analysis, based on 4 full seasons of play, teams were not significantly worse when playing the 4th game in 5 days or the 2nd of back-to-back games at home. My road team disadvantage wasn't nearly as great as what Cuban claimed--in fact, it was roughly half as important as the basic home court advantage. In other words, the schedule gods just weren't THAT important.

What's responsible for the difference? I decided to re-run my regression analysis against the data his team used: games from the current 2005-06 season through December 15. This time, my results were very similar to his:

Net Point Disadvantages (2005-06 season through 12/15)

My average factors (weighted by number of road vs. home games played) of 3.4 and 8.7 are roughly the same as Cuban's factors of 3.5 and 8, and vastly different from the 2001-2005 data. Looking at the results of these games, it's easy to see why. Teams are doing much worse in back-to-back and 4/5 games so far this season than they did in the previous 4 seasons:

Teams Playing 2nd of Back-to-Back Games

Teams Playing 4th Game in 5 Days

I can think of two possible explanations for this disparity: either something changed this year which makes it tougher for teams to play in back-to-back games, or it's just randomness (or other words, luck). I chalk it up to luck, based on the relatively small number of 2005-06 games so far.

By the end of 2005-06, I bet we'll see numbers that are a lot closer to the 2001-2005 results. In fact, just including the next week of games (12-16 through 12-22) already reduces the disadvantage of 4th game in 5 nights by 3.18 points and the disadvantage of the 2nd of back-to-back games by .16 points.