## 1 Introduction  
Basketball seasons impose extensive physiological [1], physical [1], and psychological [2] loading on players due to the regular training, competition, travel, and contractual commitments they involve. In turn, basketball players experience notable fatigue across the competition schedule [3], emphasizing the importance of implementing suitable recovery strategies and rest opportunities for players throughout the season. Indeed, basketball practitioners have indicated they place high importance on recovery strategies, predominantly to reduce injury risk, optimize readiness, reduce fatigue, prevent overtraining, and enhance the psychological well-being of their players [4]. Sleep is considered the most important recovery process among male and female team sport athletes [5, 6]. Sleepvariables have been significantly associated with in-game performance [7; 8] and injury risk [9; 10] in basketball players, emphasizing the importance of sleep within the sport. Consequently, expert consensus [11] recommends practitioners identify specific situations that may negatively impact sleep among their athletes to develop targeted interventions. Various contextual factors may impose situations that impede basketball players from attaining adequate sleep duration and quality. For instance, different samples of basketball players have been reported to experience significantly poorer sleep following games [12], following training sessions when games are played on the following day [13], and on nights before games [14] compared to other nights. Further considering training and game contexts, competing away from home can impose added travel requirements and expose players to unfamiliar environments [11] as well as augment anxiety levels [15], which may further impact player sleep. Despite this logic, no significant differences in sleep variables between nights following games played at home and away venues have been reported in semi-professional, male [16] and professional, female basketball players [14]. However, control nights or nights before games were not factored in the comparisons conducted in these studies [14; 16], limiting the rigor of evidence provided concerning the impact of game venue on sleep. In contrast, no significant effects were reported for sleep duration (hours) or efficiency (which represents sleep quality, determined as the ratio of sleep duration expressed relative to total time in bed as a percentage) between home and away games on nights before, following, and the day after games, nor control nights, in professional, female basketball players [8]. However, these studies [8; 14; 16] represent a relatively small evidence base with only one study [8] considering different nights surrounding home and away games, creating a need for more research on this topic to improve the current understanding. Season period is another contextual factor that has been theorized to impact sleep among athletes, with variations in sleep variables documented across seasonal phases among different athlete samples in a recent review [17]. However, the impact of season period on sleep in basketball players remains to be definitively explored and warrants specific investigation given the constraints and challenges towards sleep that likely vary between sports [11]. To date, research has reported non-significant differences in subjective sleep quality between the off-season and regular season in male, high-school basketball players [18] and shown nightly self-reported sleep duration and quality to fluctuate widely across the entire season in collegiate, male basketball players [9]. However, the lack of statistical comparison across defined periods during the regular season and objective data acquired with validated methods were notable limitations in these studies [9; 18].