So being new to the SHL, I didn't really know where to go with this mPT. So I decided to dig into the numbers. I looked at data from the FHM era (past two seasons) and compared each team's winning percentage over that time vs their home winning percentage over that time. I know this analysis isn't perfect, but rather than make something up about the actual difficulty of playing in a completely made up arena or use the same joke that everyone else is using about 'never wanting to go to X town' I figured this would do. 



Texas had the highest difference between their home record and their overall record but they have been barely better than .500 at home so it's hard to say that it's toughest to play there. Still, for a team that won 35% of it's games the past two years, it's impressive to be over 50% at home. Instead I'm going to go with the runner up team in this metric: The Calgary Dragons. Calgary was just a 14 games over .500 over the past two years but were 22 games over .500 at home. Though teams like the Hamilton Steelhawks and Buffalo Stampede had better home records, those teams were far better teams overall and would be expected to perform well at home as they would anywhere else. Calgary strikes me as the team that is gaining a clear advantage from playing on their home ice and would be a much closer to average team.

In fact, the league average delta (that is difference between home W% and overall W%) is 0.065. If you applied the league average home winning pct delta to all team's records (meaning that home ice advantage is the same boost to winning percentage for every team), Calgary would then have an expected winning percentage (Exp W%) of 0.528 which would place them in the bottom half of the league over this two year period.



I think through two years of FHM data, Calgary is looking like the toughest place to play in the SHL. We'll see if that trend continues.

Bonus points for being a Canadian city.
Thanks for coming to my TED talk.