Average ticket price. This is the average face-value price of a ticket to a game. It does not factor in premium ticket prices. Ticket prices were taken from Team Marketing Report’s analysis of 2015-2016 NBA prices.
Attendance rate. This is the average percentage of seats that were filled at home games. Attendance data for an 11-year period from 2005 to 2016 comes from ESPN.com. Two teams, the Dallas Mavericks and the Chicago Bulls, have attendance rates that are higher than 100%. This can be explained by the fact that maximum attendance numbers are exclusive of standing room only tickets and some luxury box seats.
Win percentage. Data on the percentage of wins each team had from 2005-2016 comes from ESPN.com
Dedication factor. We created this factor in an attempt to measure how dedicated the fans of each team are. That is, whether they attended games even when their team was on a losing streak. The dedication factor was calculated by finding the difference between the attendance rate and the win percentage of each team over the 2005-2016 period.
Median income. This is the median income of residents within the metro area that a team calls home. We looked at metro area instead of each specific city because many people who attend NBA games come from outside the city center. Income data is from the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2015 American Community Survey.
Hours of work needed to pay for the average ticket. This is the number of hours a resident in each team’s metro area needs to work on average in order to afford the average ticket. In order to create this statistic, we first derived the median hourly wage by dividing each metro area’s annual median income by 2080, which is the number of hours a typical worker works per year. We then divided the average ticket price by the average hourly wage to get hours of work needed to pay for a ticket.