The new NBA season has entered the countdown of the last week. According to the schedule of the new season, the Lakers, as a team absent from the playoffs last season, were still arranged to face the “beauty” of the defending champion Warriors, one of the most important reasons, it is the big ball market effect of Los Angeles that brings the Lakers the heat of Thunder.
So, what is the big ball market? In the NBA, which works harder and harder for involution, can small city teams still “win with weakness 」?
Text/Li Jiayun
Knitted/Yinhao male
What does being in big and small cities mean to a sports club?
For NBA fans, the word “football market” is no stranger to everyone.
Generally speaking, the strength of the city represents the size of the team’s market, from the Los Angeles Lakers located in the City of Angels to the New York Knicks, which became the Holy Land of basketball, these recognized big ball market teams all illustrate this point. Those who watch the game all know that Los Angeles and New York are good and Memphis is not good. Then let’s take a look at the team gap in big and small cities. What is it reflected in?
As we all know, cities that can have a professional team are “the best in the city 」. For NBA, even the “small city” Memphis in the fan’s impression still has 77.2 billion GDP, ranking 47th among 384 metropolitan areas in the United States-in other words, if NBA now announces its choice of destination for the next expansion team, only the top 50 cities in the United States can enter the scope of discussion.
But even in the 28 big American cities in NBA, there is a huge gap between them. And these gaps are also intuitively transformed into the difference in the income generated by each city for the team. Objective factors such as the government’s economic level, population, citizen’s income and infrastructure have drawn a clear dividing line between teams in large and small cities.
For example, according to the statistics of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, in 2021, the GDP of the New York region had reached 1.33 trillion horrible, equivalent to nearly 35 Memphis regions-this does not mean that Memphis people have no money to watch the ball, however, if anyone is more willing and capable of spending for The home team than The citizens of The Big Apple Big Apple, The result should be obvious.
After NBA announced the regular schedule of the new season, ESPN,ABC and TNT three major broadcasters also gave the national live broadcast of NBA teams next season, among which 30 defending champions last season took the lead, the Lakers played 27 games, and the Celtics tied for the third place in 15 games.
Let’s look at the end of the list. There is only one national live broadcast team throughout the year: San Antonio Spurs, Oklahoma City Thunder, Utah Jazz in Salt Lake City, orlando’s Magic… if it had to be attributed to their poor record last year, no one would watch it. The Jazz ranked 5th in the West said that Spurs fans would definitely not like it either. After all, they won one more game than the Lakers.
Therefore, whether it is the official arrangement of the league or the actions of the cooperative media, it shows one point: the popularity and topics brought by the teams in big cities with poor performance are still not comparable to those of small cities.
In NBA, the purest Business Alliance, popularity is almost proportional to income. In addition to the attention in the broadcasting field, sponsors are willing to spend several times or even dozens of times the price to tie their brand names and big city teams together.
Since the league increased the shirt advertisement in 2017, a patch on the shirt has also become one of the main sources of income for each team, and the gap between teams in large and small cities is also vividly reflected in this point. In last November, Warriors extended the cooperation agreement with Lotte Group, the sponsor of jerseys, extending the sponsorship of jerseys that began in 2017. According to CNBC, the new contract will reach 40 million dollars per year. In contrast, the annual amount of sponsorship contracts reached between jazz and Qualtics was 4 million US dollars, a gap of ten times.
According to statistics, in the past 2021-2022 season, the sponsorship income of 30 NBA teams increased by 12.5 percent compared with last year, reaching the highest amount of 1.64 billion dollars in history. However, the 12.5% increase was largely due to the increase in the propaganda demand of encrypted currency companies. The amount of sponsorship from encrypted currency companies soared to US $0.15 billion from 2 million a year ago, it has become the second largest sponsor category in NBA.
As the emerging sponsorship category of NBA, they also target their cooperation targets directly to the expensive “big city teams” such as Warriors and Lakers 」.
For example, the title change of the legendary stadium Staples Center is one of the most concerned deals. In November 2021, the encrypted currency website reached a two-decade sponsorship agreement with Staples Center, the base camp of the Lakers Clippers, totaling more than 0.7 billion dollars, staples Center was officially renamed Crypto.com arena 」.
However, it has been pointed out before that the Clippers will draw a clear line with the Lakers around 2024 and move to the new stadium built by boss Ballmer at 2 billion dollars. It is undeniable that Crypto.com, which has been signed for 20 years, has enough confidence in the Lakers’ ability to maintain popularity and competitiveness for a long time.
Major sponsors are willing to spend several times more than the market level to sign contracts with the big ball market. In addition to their current achievements and popularity, the most important point is that even if the results are not good or the stars fall, big city teams with three advantages, including urban development, high exposure and sponsorship, also attract stars from the whole league to run away from their mother teams to enjoy Los Angeles, benefits brought by big ball markets such as San Francisco.
Or the Lakers-there is still such a popularity on the basis of poor record, and the combination of Giants James, heavy eyebrows and Westbrook is one of the important reasons. The three players basically transferred from the “small team” to the Lakers. The gap between hardware and software visible to the naked eye makes the small ball markets with weak cards miserable, and they can only watch the stars making the best choice for themselves.
Big cities, big ball markets, everyone has difficult classics
Judging the size of the market behind a team, in addition to the paper strength of the city, ratings, attendance, team culture, fan diversion, etc., may also become a decisive factor at any point. Even if the two teams are in the same city, their current situation may be very different.
With the signing of mini truck, George’s joining and the new stadium, the Los Angeles Clippers once made their fans see the hope of “turning over to be the master” in Los Angeles in the past two years. However, a series of data show that it seems that local fans in Los Angeles still don’t buy it, and the ticket price is one of the best manifestations-in the 2021-22 season, the average ticket price of the Lakers in the secondary market reached 562 dollars. However, due to the absence of Leonard and George (who only played 31 games), the average fare of the Clippers was only 202 dollars.
Even if the ticket difference is four times, the proud Los Angeles people also recognize the team wearing purple gold jersey. According to statistics, in the season from 2021 to 2022, the attendance rate of the Lakers with poor record still reached 97.3%, and the average number of seats in 18,414 also ranked 7th in the league. On the contrary, the Clippers only have a 89.6% attendance rate and a 16,918 average number of people on board, which is in the middle and lower reaches of the alliance.
Los Angeles, which is the envy of other small ball city clubs, sells tickets cheaper than Milwaukee ($282), which is the current situation of Clippers. The 17th number of people in the league made them look more like a small ball market team instead, which may also be one of the reasons why they are eager to move to the new stadium.
The overall income level can prove the gap between the two. According to Statics statistics, the annual income of the Lakers has stabilized at more than $0.3 billion in the past five years, reaching 0.426 billion of the young pioneer team history record in 2018-2019; The highest year of the Clippers is only $0.273 billion, it is the same level as the Kings team called Sacramento village nearby.
The camera moved to the east coast, Washington D.C. As the capital of the United States, the per capita GDP reached 220000 US dollars in 2021, which is one of the richest capitals in the world, but located in Washington D.C. The talent team cannot be counted as a big ball market team. According to Forbes, the Washington Wizards currently have a market value of $1.93 billion, ranking only 16th in the league.
So, who took the ball market in Washington?
A survey by Washington Post in 2019 showed that only 8% of local residents regarded wizards as their favorite team. However, whether it is the MLB national team, the national team of the national team of the national team of the national team of the national team of the national team of the national team of the national team of the national team of the national team of the national team of the national team of the national team of the national team of the national team of the national team of the national team of the national team of the national team of the national team of the national team of the national team of, all of them make the wizards who are in awkward positions all the year round pale, and the base number of fans is naturally small.
The local popularity of the Wizards ranks behind the national team, Commander and capital people, and ranks fourth with the mysterious people. As an NBA team invested hundreds of times more than WNBA, the popularity of wizards at present is really out of step with Washington, a traditional sports city.
Stories of small cities can also be told wonderfully.
Then, the teams in big cities have already been “rolled”. If you are in a small city, what should an NBA team do?
Perhaps the arms could not be pulled to the thigh after all, but the Thunder of the previous few years, now Milwaukee and other small cities, have also achieved success from different angles in this increasingly “rolling” alliance, let other small cities see hope. For a long time, NBA officials have maintained the underlying logic of “equal opportunities” among teams from the aspects of talent selection, wage restrictions and standardized transactions.
Take thunder as an example. Can one person change the market of the whole team? The answer is yes. James is to Cleveland, Jordan is to Chicago, and Alphabet is to Milwaukee… the appearance of each of them has brought unprecedented influence and commercial value to their respective cities.
However, the person who changed the team was not limited to players, such as the general manager of Thunder team eukaryote Presti.
In 2007, 29-year-old Sam Presti was appointed as the general manager of Seattle SuperSonics and took down Durant at the talent show. But after only one season, due to the breakdown of negotiations between the SuperSonics and Seattle about the new stadium, boss Clay Bennett moved the team to his hometown Oklahoma City and changed his name to thunder.
From the largest city in the northwestern United States to Oklahoma, a small city with no professional sports history, many fans think Thunder will become another “perennial fish brisket”, but Presti has different plans. After choosing Durant, he chose Westbrook and Harden one after another, making the Thunder who just built the team beat Spurs of GDP in the Western finals and successfully reached the finals, gain a firm foothold in the alliance and stay in the position of Western Haoqiang for the next period of time.
Later, after Durant left, he helped Wei Shao to play MVP season, and the deal was very sensational at that time. Wei Shao, George, Anthony, after the stars left, they “realized” their assets more than nearly 40 future picks, and every step Presti took seemed so strategic.
For a small ball market like Oklahoma, he operated the Thunder to an unexpected level. Although the Thunder rebuilt in recent years has not a high sense of presence in the league, Presti’s actions have proved that as long as he is there, the fire of basketball in this small town will not decline.
Compared with fashion metropolises such as New York and Los Angeles, Oklahoma, a small town famous for tornadoes, which propped up urban economy with agriculture and oil fields, may never be the first choice for big-name free players, but it is definitely a city that players will fall in love with from the moment they get off the plane. As the only professional team in the city, Thunder made good use of this and established irreplaceable ties with the local government and fans.
When thunder first arrived in Russia in 2008, it was directly seated in the best local stadium Ford Stadium. After changing the name of the stadium twice in 14 years, News recently broke that the Russian city government intended to build a new stadium for the team. Not to mention NBA, it is to look at the four major leagues, and there are few cases in which the government takes the initiative to build a stadium for the team. At the media level, Thunder officials also reached a stable cooperation with local TV broadcaster Bally Sports Oklahoma and broadcast WWLS 98.1 FM for 14 years and will continue.
Meanwhile, Thunder officials attach great importance to the construction of fan culture. Since the self-built team, Thunder’s community activities such as training camps and foundation donations have only been much more than those of big city teams. Thunder and Oklahoma City people have influenced each other, becoming more integrated and more closely related.
“No matter when, Oklahoma City fans unconditionally support Thunder, every NBA team will contribute to the city, but Thunder has done more. Medical treatment, education, post-disaster reconstruction, when the city needs help, it will always see the shadow of the Thunder team. 」 Geridard Bleacher, a PROTONIC Report reporter born in Oklahoma City, wrote in his article.
Of course, the fans also gave back Thunder in their own way. As one of the smallest football markets in NBA, the Thunder team’s attendance rate before reconstruction has always been in the middle and upper reaches of the league, and the home game has never dropped 90% every year-this is not only a team operating in Oklahoma, it is also one of the city business cards that make citizens proud.
If it were not for the existence of Thunder, many Chinese might not have any concept of the five words “Oklahoma. A team carries not only the players and fans on the court, but also their own unique urban spirit and cultural core. This may be one of the charms of sports.
Reference Source: TheAthletic / Statista / SportsPro / TheWashingtonPost / SportsIllustrated