The Sonics also sold out every home game during the 1996-97, 1997-98 and 1998-99 seasons. By my math, that streak included 114 regular-season games and 23 playoff games.
]]>And as others have alluded to, it's possible the Nets fans are very loyal, but there just aren't many of them. Still, our definitions of "loyalty" could be semantics, and this is still an interesting study.
]]>In terms of Seattle's loyalty, as someone who lived up there I think loyalist views of the overall fanbase's loyalty are generally exaggerated or greatly exaggerated. The fans that were there were quite loyal, but huge swaths of the Seattle metro area simply didn't care. Seattle would also be more affected than most towns on this list from competition--no NHL, but the Seahawks, Mariners and Huskies were all significant factors in diluting Sonics interest which led to a very wishy-washy level of interest depending upon on-court success. Even when success was found, though, support still wasn't as widespread as for the other sports--when you can literally buy walk-up tickets for a Western Conference Finals game in 1996, the height of their popularity, and not have to go to scalpers as I did, it says that the fan base, while passionate, didn't cover large chunks of the population there.
]]>I would assume teams like Utah would have the best.
]]>For instance, the Lakers expected attendance percentage was 97.5% meaning that even if fans were literally fighting to the death every night outside the arena to get in and had a perfect 100% attendance record they would have finished no higher than 5th on the list as they couldn't possibly exceed the expected attendance by more than 2.5% (and to their credit they did exceed their expected by 2.2%). When a team has no mathematical chance at being higher than 5th then the results aren't necessarily accurate.
I think it would be interesting to include ticket price into the study as well (or possibly a ratio of ticket price to per capita income). Any team would probably be close to 100% attendance if the tickets prices were $1.00 and they all would suffer drastically if the average ticket price was $1,000 regardless of the product on the floor.
]]>Maybe, your formula is more applicable to the teams that have low winning percentage for the last decade.
And I pity the nets.
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