Wednesday, February 3

Two Halves

By my count, every team in the league has played at least 22 home games, giving us 22 games' worth of attendance data to study. Interestingly, if you split those 22 games into two halves, you get some surprising numbers when comparing the results from this year to last year.

For example:

- The NBA averaged 8,642 fewer fans per night in the first 11 games of the season, when compared to last season.

- In the second 11 games, the league averaged 11,512 fewer fans per night, a 33 per cent drop off. Is that a trend, or just minor fluctuation in numbers?

- Attendance per night of the week:
Sunday: 1,420,325, 80 nights, 17,754 per night
Monday: 1,415,468, 84 nights, 16,850 per night
Tuesday: 1,635,538, 97 nights, 16,861 per night
Wednesday: 2,500,580, 154 nights, 16,237 per night
Thursday: 614,378, 32 nights, 19,199 per night
Friday: 2,538,808, 146 nights, 17,389 per night
Saturday: 2,069,891, 117 nights, 17,691 per night

- Largest crowd: 22,076, Detroit, five times this season

- Smallest crowd: 9,220, Clippers at New Jersey, Jan. 27, 2010

- Lowest median attendance: New Jersey, 12,131

- Largest standard deviation in attendance: Philadelphia, 3,237

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posted by PN @ 10:10 AM   4 comments

4 Comments:

What was the average nightly TEAM attendance for a 'first 11' game this year? I'm assuming your 8,642 number is a cumulative number for all thirty teams?

If that's the case, that reduction of only about 288 fans per team game. That wouldn't be much of anything - roughly 1.6% below last year's full-season average of 17.5K per game.

Using the same math, the 11,512 number would then be about 384 fans per game - about a 2.2% decrease. A decline from 1.6% to 2.2% may be 33%, but certainly seems to fall solidly into the 'minor fluctuation in numbers' bucket.

Seems like this is just a long way of saying that attendance is down about 2% from last year. I'm guessing Toyota wishes their YOY sales were only down that much . . .

By Anonymous Hacksaw, at 2/03/2010 2:56 PM  

Yep, it's a league-wide number, so your assumption is right.

Still, this is when attendance normally starts to increase as pro and college football ends and the NBA sort of has the sporting world to itself (college hoops, World Team Tennis, and the NHL notwithstanding). What's happening this year, though, is that the haves (Utah, Chicago, NYC, LAL, etc) are doing fine, but a lot of teams are really putting up bad numbers (Indy, Mil, Mem, etc), even worse than last year. It's sort of turning into a MLB thing where you've got the teams making money, and the teams just eating luxury tax receipts.

By Anonymous nuss, at 2/04/2010 9:01 AM  

I found this great supersonic tribute video on youtube. It's awesome!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UsKOdtn5RmY

By Anonymous Craig, at 2/06/2010 9:46 AM  

Sorry that this has nothing to do with attendance but i wanted to make you aware of this and we need to rally the vote:

http://espn.go.com/sportsnation/dunks/_/matchup/8

ESPN is doing the best "Posterized" dunk of all time. And Kemp is nominated for his humiliation of Alton Lister. We need to rock the vote and win something for the Sonic faithful!!!

By Anonymous Jake, at 2/09/2010 12:00 PM  

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