Nobody, least of all the Boston Celtics, could explain why it took the team with the NBA's best regular season record a full seven games to dispatch Atlanta in the first round of the NBA playoffs--how the Celtics kicked the Hawks, the only sub. 500 team to reach the postseason, by an average margin of 25 in its four wins at the Boston Garden, but lost all three games in Atlanta. The Celtics, who had the best road record (31-10) in the NBA this past season, are at it again: they smothered LeBron James and his Cleveland Cavaliers two straight at home, but last night suffered a second double-digit defeat in a row in Cleveland to square the series.

The home court is supposed to be an advantage--worth three points in most bookmaking operations, just like in football--but the Celtics are hardly alone in making it seemed even more conspicuous this 2008 playoff season. New Orleans ran defending champ San Antonio off the court in the opening pair at home, then were routed two straight by the Spurs when they crossed west into Texas. The Los Angeles Lakers are even up with the the Utah Jazz after losing both games in Salt Lake City, where the Jazz were a league-leading 37-4 this season. Home teams in this second round are 15-1, with only Detroit winning on the road, a one-point squeaker in Orlando.

Granted, home teams won more than 60 percent of the home games during the regular season and only 8 of 30 NBA teams had losing records at home. Still, the discrepancy in the numbers--home and away--in this playoff round has been mind-boggling. Look what happened when the the two teams that met in the 2007 Finals, the Spurs and the Cavaliers, arrived home trailing 0-2: San Antonio, having shot 41.6% from the field on the road, shot 49.7% at home. The Cavs jumped from 33.1 percent shooting in Boston to 49.3 percent. Even the superstars weren't immune to road woes: LeBron James shot 8 for 42 in Boston; Tim Duncan went 1 for 9 and scored just five points in the opener in New Orleans: and Kobe Bryant was 13 for 33 in the Laker loss Sunday.

So what exactly is the homecourt advantage? The comforts of home--familiar food, your own bed-- as well as knowing the court and the rim (and in the old Boston Garden, Red Auerbach used to play nasty tricks with the temperatures and conditions in the cramped visitors locker room) must play some part. And as the game has become increasingly emotive--more fist-pumping and chest-thumping--the crowd frenzy may have more effect, up and down, on today's players. Of course, there is also the critical question of whether the home crowd has an impact on the officiating. A likely case in point would be the key three-pointer scored by Detroit at the end of the third period of Game 2 against Orlando, where a clock snafu forced officials to guess whether the Pistons got the shot off within 5.1 seconds. Watching the game and guessing along with the officials it seemed unlikely to me and one inevitably wonders if the path of least resistance was dealing with an angry coach rather than Detroit's famously angry crowd.

Still, I confess I look hard for what I perceive to be official bias and--besides the consideration given superstars like James and Bryant, a time-honored NBA tradition--didn't see much clear evidence of it. The Cavs, for example, were awarded 53 free throws to Boston's 56 in the two games at the Garden, 51 to Boston's 50 at home. New Orleans shot 39 free throws to the Spurs 40 in New Orleans, 33 to the the Spurs 41 in San Antonio. Or to put it in human terms, I've seen LeBron lower his shoulder into a defender and actually get called for charging at both home and way in this series.

Whatever accounts for the discrepancy is a pretty good advertisement for David Stern's rejuvenated NBA. The oft-repeated complaint is that the season is too long, the players can't get up for 82 games and, thus, too many games are meaningless. Obviously, there is some truth in that. But this year's playoffs are demonstrating that playoff positioning counts a great deal and some good teams that had to open on the road may have been doomed from the start. The Celtics, by virtue of the best record in the league this year, are in position to pull of an unprecedented, if very unlikely, trick--winning the NBA championship without a single victory on the road.