A road team is the visiting basketball team playing away from its home venue. NBA data commonly identifies it with location fields such as teamLoc = "Away" or abbreviations such as R, enabling comparisons with home teams. section 7.4.1 section 9.3
Road-team analysis can ask whether venue relates to fouls or free-throw opportunities. During the 2018–19 regular season, road teams received 25,947 personal-foul calls versus 25,477 for home teams, averaging 0.38 more fouls per game. Home teams attempted about 0.65 more free throws per game, while both groups made 77% of their attempts. section 7.4.1
Testing a road-team difference
Filter the fouls1819 data to the 2018–19 regular season, then compare pfR with pfH using a Welch two-sample t-test. The road-team mean was 21.095 personal fouls per game versus 20.713 for home teams; p = 0.02727, below the 0.05 threshold. A second test found fewer road-team free-throw attempts: 22.747 versus 23.398, p = 0.03072. Paired boxplots display both distributions and their means.
