The story of individual NBA team attendance is less straightforward than that of baseball. Since attendance hovers around max capacity at 93% and arena sizes are the smallest of the major sports, much depends on the capacity of the home venue for each team in addition to the usual factors such as team success and market size. Thus, the team with the largest venue—the Chicago Bulls, who built the United Center during the peak of Michael Jordan’s popularity—has the highest total attendance and the highest average attendance.
In fact, the 14 teams with the highest total attendance yield the identical order in terms of average attendance. These data suggest that other attendance statistics should be used to asses live game team interest. For example, the Bulls have the 19th lowest minimum game attendance at 17,462. To see the full data on NBA game attendance along with more insights, view the previous installment of FanWide’s data science blog series.
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