Contrary to what most people believe about the NBA home-court advantage, the home team doesn’t always and automatically receive three points in the spread. The above mentioned belief is probably fueled by what bettors know about college sports. In the NCAA, home court advantage is indeed worth slightly more than 3 points, in the NBA and NFL though, it’s more like somewhere around 2,5 points, depending on the season and a set of other factors.

After all things said and done, the bottom line is that the home court advantage is the least important in the NBA than in any other professional sport. The schedule the league has is probably to blame for this fact. Teams often have back to back games in two different corners of the country on back to back nights, so when the factors like exhaustion and jet-lag come into play, the home court advantage takes a blow.

The number of road games a team plays during a trip has a big influence on the spread too. Consider a Detroit-Portland match-up, in Portland. If the Pistons travel to Portland and meet the Blazers in their first game of an eventual West-Coast trip, the spread is going to say one thing, if they play the Blazers at the end of a road trip in which they played the Suns, the Clippers, and the Lakers, the spread would look very different.

Locating hidden value in NBA games is much tougher than in any other sports, and it obviously requires a much more careful handicapping.