I have heard both praise and grousing about the “blue-out” campaigns the Mavs (and other teams) have orchestrated during the playoffs. Some say it’s cool and like cheap, free t-shirts. Some say it’s stupid, and at least one person in my Twitter stream last night complained that it made the entire arena look like Thunder fans.
But do these color-outs work? Apparently so, according to the Wall Street Journal (via the blog Spurs Nation), where numbers were crunched and statistics statisticked and lo – “In the 71 instances where fans turned the arena into a solid block of color, the home teams have won 53 times for a 74.6 percent winning percentage.”
3 comments
How does that stat compare to the regular ‘home court advantage’?
@El Rey:
74.6 vs. 68.8. I’m no statistics guru, but that doesn’t seem like a huge difference when there are so many other factors that go into a 48-minute game.
I agree with Bethany’s Twitter friend. The American Airlines Center look like a sea of Thunder fans. And Kevin Durant sure felt right at home while amassing his 40-points.
Sure, we won, and Dirk was great, and our bench is better. All of that would be the case if we fans collectively dressed as Disney characters. But the flip side is that we only won by 9 points, so we darn sure needed Dirk to score 22 MORE than his season average of 26 a game. He won’t do that every night, and at some point the 17,000 Mavs fans may be the perfect cosmetic palette for a Thunder promotional video. Ugh!