NBA Teams: Does market size and media attention translate to success?

Of the top of your head, which NBA teams have had the most success since the 2000-2001 season till today? The Los Angeles Lakers and Boston Celtics won titles, and so did the San Antonio Spurs. The Dallas Mavericks and Miami Heat did as well. The Phoenix Suns and Orlando Magic also won a ton of regular season games too. According to the NBA rankings (that I researched at a few places), only three of those seven teams are "Big Market" / Top 10 Markets. Right off the bat then we see that while being in a big market gets you on the map, you still need to put it together in order to win games. As a fan of a small market team this is good news. Of course, the smaller market teams that DO break through seem to either have an undeniable centerpiece, or are really really smart.

I did a whole bunch-o research for this post, but after the jump we look at just the raw numbers or NBA rankings for each team in terms of:

• Metro Area Population,
  
• Market Size,
  
• # of Sports teams per market,
  
• Official Team Twitter account follower rankings,
  
• the aggregate average media rank,
  
• and of course winning. (Total regular season games, and all-time championships)

This is not a qualitative breakdown of the advantages and disadvantages of being a large or small NBA market team. Just a look at the quantitative numbers. That emotion filled post is better left to being written by a more talented member of the SLC Dunk team.

The info:

Regular Season Wins from 2000-2001 till today: straight forward

NBA Titles: also straight forward

Metro Area Population and Local Sports Team Comp all from here.Teams were paired up with their location and a rank was determined according to the values. E.g. New York and Brooklyn share a lot of area, so their values are very similar, if not identical. Also, local sports team competition was done in a similar fashion. All of the local sports teams (NBA, NFL, MLB, NHL, and also CFL, and MLS) were added up, and rankings were made based upon that. So New York has 10 teams, that's the most out of all the markets, so they got a #1 ranking here. Utah has 2, so they were tied for a #20 ranking.

NBA Market size rank from here. This does not include the Canadian team, because they are not in our Market. I think this is something that needs to be found out and I did not do a lot of comparative research in this department. Toronto is one of the Top 10 "best" cities in the world if you like cities like London, or New York, or Chicago. So it is similar in actual size. This NBA Market size =/= attractiveness to US free agents though. Raptors are in a tough spot.

Twitter followers, by rank, came from here. So Assist on this post goes to http://behindthebuckpass.com/ here.

Average media rank is a ranking based upon, duh, averages from the other four categories.

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The Rankings (ordered by Reg Season Wins)

Oh, look, the Jazz aren't so bad despite being in a small market after all!

I thought this would be a fun little post. Clearly being in a big market makes life both easier and harder. But I'm not going into that here. This is just the numbers. And by the numbers, the Spurs are kicking everyone's butt. Three of the "Top 10" media market teams, and four of the top 11 are in the Bottom 5 in regular season wins. (NYK, LAC, GSW, WAS) Yikes. Of course, it should be noted that the Bobcats did not exist back in 2000-2001, so their values are even lower than they should have been.

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