Apr 16, 2014; Milwaukee, WI, USA; Milwaukee Bucks guard Giannis Antetokounmpo (34) heads up court with the ball during the fourth quarter against the Atlanta Hawks at BMO Harris Bradley Center. Atlanta won 111-103. Mandatory Credit: Jeff Hanisch-USA TODAY Sports
Freelance Friday is a project that lets us share our platform with the multitude of talented writers and basketball analysts who aren’t part of our regular staff of contributors. As part of that series we’re proud to present this guest post from Andrew Livingston. You can read more of Andrew’s work at his blog, Elevator Doors, and find him on Twitter, @Elevator_Doors.
Basketball fandom is a tricky endeavor. Only one team can win a championship, and only a small handful make the playoffs. There are markets used in cities that employ almost no other Big 4 sports. Memphis, San Antonio, Charlotte and Salt Lake City still have rabid fan bases despite the lack of championships (Obviously this does not include the dynasty that is the Spurs). And just as many small market teams have gone years without any big success.
With that in mind, I tried to quantify how bad a fan of a small market team could feel when their team does poorly for so long. I created a statistics—“Small Market Team, Big Market Self-Loathing” or (SMT-BMSL) to measure that.
How do you qualify the SMT-BMSL percentage? This is a two-part equation. Part One: Take the size of the teams television market (X) and add it to the years that the team has been at that location (Y). Part Two: Take the last year the team won a championship (regardless of where that team was) and subtract it with the year the last time the team was in the playoffs. Divide Part One by Part Two and there is your percentage.
Using the Milwaukee Bucks as an example, we take the television market size index and that gives us an X of 35. The Bucks were founded in 1968 and we take the years to 2014. That gives us a Part One total of 81.
The Bucks last won a title in 1971 and were last in the playoffs in 2010. The total difference is 39 years, giving us our Y. Dividing Part One by Part Two gives is a SMT-BMSL rating of 31.59%.
So, almost a third of the year, an average Bucks fan is down in the dumps.
On the other side, I took a look at the Lakers. X was equal to 2 and Y was 1954 (The Lakers moved to Los Angeles in 1960). Part One total was 56. The Part Two total was 3. The Lakers last won a title in 2010 and were last in the playoffs in 2013.
Using the Part One and Part Two totals, the SMT-BMSL rating of 18.67%. The Lakers have turned a skid in the last couple of years since Kobe Bryant’s recent outbreak of injuries and from this rating the Lakers fans are going through just under 20% of season long self-loathing.
I was a little shocked to see that those percentages were so close, but numbers never lie!