Welcome to #NBAVineRank

May 26, 2015; Cleveland, OH, USA; Cleveland Cavaliers center Tristan Thompson (13), guard J.R. Smith (5), forward LeBron James (23) and guard Iman Shumpert (4) react from the bench during the fourth quarter against the Atlanta Hawks in game four of the Eastern Conference Finals of the NBA Playoffs at Quicken Loans Arena. Mandatory Credit: David Richard-USA TODAY Sports /

Every year before the NBA season starts, ESPN does a fun project called #NBARank, in which they rank every single player in the NBA. It’s a painstaking process that results in mostly fun and entertaining debate.

This year at Friendly Bounce, we riffed off their idea to create a new project called #NBAVineRank. While #NBARank’s goal is to determine the best player in the NBA, #NBAVineRank’s goal is to determine the most Vineable team in the league.

Vineability isn’t really something that can be defined. It’s mostly a combination of starpower, athleticism, skill, luck, and quality media coverage. Sometimes though, it can be the complete opposite of those things. As such, there were no certain criteria we gave our staff in our request for their Vineability rankings. Which may of course lead to a lively debate about these rankings, but that’s part of the fun.

So how did we go about this ranking process? Well, we asked our staff members to consider each team and give them a score between one and 10, with one being the rather boring and extremely un-Vineable, and 10 being highly entertaining and extremely Vineable. There were no rules regarding the number of teams that could receive a certain score. So for example, a writer could have given the Warriors, Clippers, and Cavaliers all 10s, and that would be fine. Likewise, a writer could have given the Nets, Pacers, and Celtics all 3s, and that would have been fine as well.

Once each writer’s ballot was submitted, we tallied up the total score for each team and then divided it by the number of ballots submitted to find the average. That average was the team’s official score. Then we ordered the scores from highest to lowest, creating the first ever #NBAVineRank.

Later today we’ll begin the process of releasing our results, starting with the bottom five teams. Every few days or so we’ll release the next group, with the groups becoming progressively smaller as we get closer to the top. For each group, we’ll have some sort of short write-up, usually in the form of a roundtable discussion.

We’ve had a lot of fun going through this process so far, and we hope it will continue as our rankings are released. Hopefully all of you will enjoy it as well. Let’s get into it.

Welome to #NBAVineRank.

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