Exploring Patterns of NBA Teams on Wikipedia

by Raymone Cao

 

The pages I chose include all thirty teams in the current National Basketball Association. I am interested in exploring the pages related to NBA because I am passionate about everything about basketball. In 2002, Yao Ming was selected by Houston Rockets as the first overall pick in the NBA draft. That Yao entered NBA in 2002 built a bridge between China and the United States, and made more people feel the magic of basketball. Thanks to Yao, I am granted opportunities to appreciate these exciting games and get to know my current idol, Lebron James. I have witnessed the buzzer beater he made in the 2009 Eastern Conference Final against Magic, the big three he made in the 2012 Final against Thunders after the cramp in his leg, and the legendary block he made on Iguodala in 2015 Final against Warriors. The decision he made to “take his talent to South Beach” in 2010 turned everybody against him while the championship he brought to Cleveland in 2015 made him the hero of the city and the role model of the entire country. Indeed I have a pretty deeper understanding of teams and players that I love, but there are other teams in NBA that I am not familiar with. Therefore, I want to take advantage of this chance to explore more about NBA and gain more knowledge about basketball.

Basically, I selected thirty pages from Wikipedia and each of them represents a NBA team. Since some teams moved from one city to another or changed their names in the past few years, I would choose the most current names of all teams in NBA to avoid confusions. I arranged the pages in a particular order mainly based on the location of each team. The first fifteen teams are located in the East coast, so they belong to the Eastern Conference. Then teams under Eastern Conference are divided into three different divisions: Atlantic, Central and Southeast Division. First five teams belong to Atlantic Division; sixth to tenth teams belong to Central Division; last five teams belong to Southeast Division. The same method applies to the teams that belong to Western Conference. First five teams are in Southwest Division; sixth to tenth teams belong to Northwest Division; last five teams belong to Pacific Division. For example, Boston Celtics is the first team in my list that belongs to Eastern Conference and Dallas Mavericks is the sixteenth in my list but the first one that belongs to Western Conference. One thing to notice is that teams only compete with those within the same Conference, so teams under difference Conferences will not meet each other in the Playoffs until the very last in case you are not familiar with the rule of NBA.

Although the page I created may not provide very detailed information of each team, there still exist many interesting observations that worth mentioning. The page for each team is getting more and more informative each year. There are more contents involved in the page now as compared to 2002. For example, as for Boston Celtics, there were only 4510 characters in 2002 but in 2018 the number of characters are 487136. The only two section headers for Celtics in 2002 were Franchise history and Players of note, while in 2018, there are sixteen big sections with several nested sub sections. In addition, the first paragraph of Celtics page is getter longer over time, with only four lines in 2002 and over ten lines in 2018. One explanation for the reduction in the length of the first paragraph from 2015 to 2016 may be that someone regarded the original paragraph too long and then made some editions to divide it into two paragraphs. But in general there is a positive relationship between the number of year and the length of the first paragraph. Another example is New Orleans Pelicans. The amount of characters in its page skyrockets form 2412 in 2002 to 202019 in 2018. Its section headers also expand from two to ten. The reason why both the amount of its character and the number of section headers are less than those of Boston Celtics is that Celtics has a longer history as it was founded in 1946 as one of the original eight NBA teams. The Pelicans was formed later in 1988, so that it is about 40 years younger than Celtics. The length of Pelican’s first paragraph is also increasing over time but there is no first paragraph shown in 2002. One possible explanation is that there is something wrong with the format so that the code cannot capture the contents of the first paragraph. In general, one of the most important reason why the pages are getting more informative over time is that the internet is getting more and more popular. Twenty years ago, everyone read newspapers or magazines and very few people owned computers since they were super expensive at that time. But now we are able to access to any information on the internet and almost everybody owns his or her personal computer. Therefore, more people are able to edit the pages of NBA teams in Wikipedia and then the pages become more and more informative and comprehensive.

Furthermore, some teams did not have records in 2002 because they moved from one city to another and renamed themselves. For example, The Seattle Supersonics moved to Oklahoma and became Oklahoma City Thunder in 2008. In that case, there is no information about Oklahoma City Thunders prior to 2018 since it did not even exist back then. Besides, the Grizzlies was established in1995 in Vancouver and then moved to Memphis in 2001 and became Memphis Grizzlies. Thus the lack of information in 2002 may be explained by the geographical migration of the team.

One weird observation is that the first images of twenty nine teams appear to be the team logo while the first image of Cleveland Cavaliers is a photo of Lebron James. One reasonable explanation may be that the size of the team logo in Cavaliers page is too small so that the image cannot be captured by the codes. Or is this an implication that Lebron James is more important than Cleveland Cavaliers? The championship James won in 2015 would possibly tell you the answer.

There are two clusters that seem particularly interesting. The cluster 1 includes Dallas Mavericks, Houston Rockets, San Antonio Spurs, Utah Jazz and Phoenix Suns. These five teams have complicated relationships with each other. Mavericks, Rockets and Spurs have always been competing with each other about who is the best team in Texas. Spurs argues that it has won five championships; Rockets characterizes itself as the first team in Texas to win an NBA championships and to have back-to-back championships; Mavericks argues that it beat the unstoppable “Big Three” in 2011 lead by Lebron James, Dwayne Wade, and Chris Bosh. As for Utah Jazz, it always matched up with Houston in the Playoff and had a bad relationship with each other when Yao was still playing. We Chinese basketball fans hated Utah particularly because Rockets led by Yao and Tracy at that time was always defeated by Utah Jazz in the first round of Playoffs. The Phoenix Suns had an old grudge with Spurs. When the Phoenix Suns led by Steve Nash encountered the Spurs led by Duncan, Ginobili and Parker, the game must be really physical and somebody would bleed for sure. The tension between these two teams are ineffable. Cluster 4 is another interesting one which includes Charlotte Hornets and New Orleans Pelicans. The franchise was first established in Charlotte and was given the name Charlotte Hornet. However, the team was moved to New Orleans and its name became New Orleans Hornets. Then the franchise was temporarily relocated to Oklahoma City due to the influence of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. At last, the team officially renamed itself as New Orleans Pelicans in 2013.

There still exist many other incredibly interesting patterns that I did not mention; if you find anything cool when you are viewing my page, please contact me through my email 307909380@qq.com so that we can discuss about it together. I am so excited about the new discoveries!


An image of NBA team map.

This Figure shows the current location of each franchise.