In a May interview, Tampa Bay forward Alex Killorn told NHL.com that home ice doesn’t matter as much as it once did.
He’s not alone in believing that. Hockey analysts have been picking apart the idea of “home-ice advantage” for years. In the 2012 research paper “New Insights Involving the Home Team Advantage”, Tim B. Swartz and Adriano Arce describe how what was once a notable correlation between wins and location became steadily more scattered over the decades in both the NHL and NBA.
Swartz and Arce are not the only analysts to find that data doesn’t back up the generally-accepted understanding that teams are more successful when they play at home.