WNBA home court advantage is almost gone. Jet lag is not.

In July 2026, researchers from Monash University, Brigham and Women's Hospital and others published the first large study of travel and jet lag in the WNBA [1]. They looked at 3,489 regular season games across 18 seasons, from 2007 to 2024, and adjusted for game time, team strength, opponent strength and season [1]. The headline is simple. Home court advantage has been shrinking for years.

Why the home edge shrank

Home teams won 64.3% of their games in 2009 and 52.3% in 2024, barely better than a coin flip [1]. The authors note that the drop lines up with better travel conditions across the league [1]. That makes sense. Part of home advantage was always the other team being worn out from getting there. When travel gets easier for visitors, the gap closes. Travel still mattered for away teams, though. The more miles a team had covered in the previous 7 days, the worse it played, mostly because it gave up more points [1].

The surprise: jet lag hit the home team

The most interesting finding is about who carries the jet lag. Eastward jet lag was linked to worse performance by home teams [1]. Westward jet lag showed no link, and neither did jet lag for away teams [1]. In plain words, the team that got hurt was often one that had just flown east to get back home, usually after a road trip out west. Players sleep in their own beds, so it feels like recovery. But their body clocks are still hours behind, and east is the hard direction. The body catches up about 1 time zone per day going east, and faster going west [3]. This is not only a WNBA pattern. Across more than 11,000 NBA games, home teams carrying eastward jet lag won less often [4].

Then a football study found the opposite

A 2026 study of 387 away evening games in the Canadian Football League found that teams traveling west did worse and teams traveling east did better [2]. The further west a team traveled, the worse it played [2]. That sounds like a contradiction, but it mostly comes down to the clock. A 7 PM kickoff out west feels like a 10 PM game to a team whose body is still on eastern time, deep into the hours when the body is winding down. A team that flew east plays the same evening game while its body thinks it is late afternoon, closer to its peak. The CFL authors end on the same point we keep coming back to: the advantage or disadvantage should be looked at for each player, not just for the team [2].

What this means for a team

First, the trip home counts. Most travel plans focus on getting to the road game. The WNBA data says the flight back can cost you the next home game, so the plan should cover the days after landing too. Second, direction and game time work together. East or west alone does not tell you much. What matters is where each player's body clock sits at tipoff or kickoff. Third, a roster is not one body. Some players adjust in a day and some take several. Sleep before the trip, training load and whether someone is naturally a morning or evening person all change how fast they recover, and a single team-wide rule cannot account for that.

What we are building

This is the problem ObeoFit is built around. Our agent looks at each athlete's schedule, sleep and where they are headed, including the time zone, heat and air quality, and texts them a plan for the days before and after a trip: when to get daylight, when to sleep, when to eat and when to push or back off in training. Coaches see the same picture for the whole roster. The research on travel is good. The hard part is getting it to the right athlete at the right hour. A note on the studies: both are observational, so they show links, not proof of cause. In the WNBA paper, one author is paid by WHOOP and another advises a jet lag company, and both are disclosed in the paper [1].