Eight road wins in 10 games: home-court advantage is losing some of its weight amid the constant games and a… punishing schedule.
How safe can a EuroLeague team feel when playing in front of its own fans? Round 10 offered a rather… discouraging answer for the hosts.
Across three days of surprises and results that sparked plenty of debate, visiting teams won eight of the 10 games: an 80% success rate on the road. Only Fenerbahce and Partizan managed to protect home court, beating Baskonia 84-65 and Maccabi Tel Aviv 88-67 respectively.
As noted on Novasports’ “Playmakers” show, those eight road wins represent a record. With one visiting team after another celebrating victory, the round provides a timely opportunity to revisit the question of how much home court really counts for in today’s European basketball.
Here are the full results from Round 10 of the regular season:
- Real Madrid – Panathinaikos Aktor 112-115
- Anadolu Efes – Paris Basketball 90-95
- Fenerbahce – Baskonia 84-65
- Hapoel Tel Aviv – Barcelona 90-93
- ASVEL – Bayern Munich 95-99
- Olimpia Milan – Valencia Basket 73-84
- Besiktas – Zalgiris Kaunas 67-83
- Olympiacos – Crvena Zvezda 57-62
- Virtus Bologna – Dubai Basketball 75-93
- Partizan – Maccabi Tel Aviv 88-67
Panathinaikos left Madrid with a win in a game featuring 227 points. Crvena Zvezda did the same at Olympiacos in a contest that produced just 119. Dubai won by 18 in Bologna, while Zalgiris beat Besiktas by 16 on the road. Some away victories came down to fine margins; others were far more comfortable. In other words, this was not a trend confined to one particular type of game or a night of extraordinary offensive production.
Of course, one round alone cannot prove that home court has stopped mattering. That would be a rushed and superficial conclusion.
Crowd support, familiar surroundings and the absence of a road trip remain advantages for any club at this level. Yet the gap between “we’re playing at home” and “we’re going to win” now looks wider than teams and their coaches would like.
The relentless schedule is central to this discussion. Constant games, travel and limited preparation time make it difficult to sustain the same intensity from one night to the next. A good result offers no guarantee that the next performance will reach the same level, and there are plenty of recent examples to support that point. Equally, a bad week does not rule out a big response on the road just a few days later.
This is where form and the range of options available off the bench enter the equation. Both clearly matter over the long term, but neither makes a team immune to slip-ups. As the number of games increases, any single contest becomes less representative of a team’s true strength. Assessing that strength requires a larger sample and fewer snap judgments after every result. That is something fans and the media need to take on board.
Nor is this discussion limited to the regular season. Road wins in the playoffs have already changed perceptions of home-court advantage. Even Game 5, once seen as the ultimate safeguard for the hosts, has sent visiting teams to the Final Four. Home court helps and still matters, but it no longer decides the outcome on its own.
During the regular season, that uncertainty is even more pronounced, as we see week after week. “Anyone can win anywhere” is more than a journalistic cliché, and Round 10 delivered an emphatic reminder. Fans are beginning to recognise what teams have to manage every day: with a schedule like this, unexpected defeats are part of the journey. However valuable home court remains, it can hardly be treated as a guarantee of victory anymore.
