
NBA’s ‘bubble’ reveals link between circadian rhythm, home court advantage
Dec. 11 (UPI) -- Home court advantage is real, but researchers have long argued over the origins of the phenomenon. More recently, however, a consensus has begun to emerge: basketball players are at their best when they get a good night's sleep in their own bed -- or at least their own time zone. Advertisement According to new analysis by a team of researchers at Oregon Health and Science University -- published Friday in the journal Scientific Reports -- shooting performance is impacted by cross-time-zone travel, while rebounding is influenced by any kind of travel. Normally, it's not possible to utilize a control group when studying differences in performance among home and road teams in the NBA, but the pandemic-necessitated "bubble" provided researchers a unique opportunity to study g...