Joined: 22 Jan 2006 Posts: 47 Location: The Prairies of the Great Middle West
Posted: Sun Oct 08, 2006 4:00 pm Post subject: The global game? Player birthplaces analysis
The global game?
We hear a lot about the diffusion of basketball. We hear a lot more about it when two NBA teams lose preseason games to euro teams.
How global is the nba? This data tries to quantify that. I took all of the birthplace data from basketball-reference.com. I've got how many current players, and how many players ever, have come from each state (and DC) and each country outside the US.
The data is current from the end of last season. The four columns are State, # of players ever in the NBA, # players currently in the NBA, and ratio of current player to ever produced players. As always, sorry for the formatting.
Sorted by number of players currently in the NBA:
Code:
State Ever Current Ratio current/ever
CA 282 44 15.60%
IL 191 29 15.18%
NY 271 28 10.33%
TX 112 26 23.21%
FL 81 19 23.46%
MI 121 19 15.70%
PA 160 18 11.25%
OH 137 17 12.41%
MS 77 13 16.88%
LA 87 11 12.64%
NJ 93 11 11.83%
GA 91 10 10.99%
NC 92 10 10.87%
WI 37 9 24.32%
IN 101 9 8.91%
SC 33 8 24.24%
WA 37 8 21.62%
OR 18 7 38.89%
MD 40 7 17.50%
DC 60 7 11.67%
TN 64 7 10.94%
KS 31 5 16.13%
MN 39 5 12.82%
MO 40 5 12.50%
KY 89 5 5.62%
CO 15 4 26.67%
IA 19 4 21.05%
AR 39 4 10.26%
VA 54 4 7.41%
AL 70 4 5.71%
NV 5 3 60.00%
WV 22 3 13.64%
DE 5 2 40.00%
UT 19 2 10.53%
CT 30 2 6.67%
AK 1 1 100.00%
NH 1 1 100.00%
ID 4 1 25.00%
SD 5 1 20.00%
MA 27 1 3.70%
OK 27 1 3.70%
NE 12 0 0.00%
AZ 8 0 0.00%
MT 7 0 0.00%
RI 6 0 0.00%
WY 5 0 0.00%
ND 4 0 0.00%
NM 3 0 0.00%
HI 2 0 0.00%
ME 1 0 0.00%
1) big states that continue to produce lots of players: California, Texas, Illinois and New York are the 4 biggest producers. Not a big surprise since they're all huge and have the 4 biggest cities (NYC, LA, Chicago, Houston). Michigan and Ohio would also fall into this group.
2) small states that have no players in the league: Nebraska, Arizona, Montana, Rhode Island, Maine, Hawaii, New Mexico, North Dakota and Wyoming have all produced NBA players, but no one currently in the league. In addition to being lightly populated states, except for Phoenix there isn't really a big city in any of these places.
3) historically high-producing states that now produce less: Indiana and Kentucky, those two storied basketball states, are the best examples. They have produced 101 and 89 players overall, placing them 8th and 12th out of US states. But currently Indiana has 9 players in the NBA and Kentucky 5.
(Please note: I am referring to the states as birthplaces, not to the universities. IU and UK still produce plenty of NBA players but many of those players - Tayshaun Prince, Antoine Walker, Chuck Hayes - come from big cities elsewhere).
4) Newer producers: states that haven't produced many pros but have done well recently. This group would be west-midwest biased: colorado, washington, oregon, wisconsin, iowa, kansas.
For international players, it's a little harder since the influx of players is much more recent and spread around. Many countries have had just one player come over and not really make it (Norway, Iceland, Denmark, Hungary, Bulgaria, Cameroon, Egypt, Estonia, Japan, etc). The former communist countries continue to be among the biggest producers - serbia, croatia, lithuania, slovenia, bosnia, russia. The newer introductions would be australia, france, argentina and brazil. And maybe greece next, I guess.
Conclusion (?): basketball has diffused widely, but it has become a more urban game. Small lightly populated states, and states without big cities are producing fewer NBA players. Historically high producing rural states like Kentucky, Alabama and Indiana are being replaced by more heavily populated states like Texas and Florida and to a lesser degree, the Western states (Oregon, Washington, Colorado). International players continue to be a big source of growth. Not a huge surprise, I suppose.
Of course, birthplace is not equal to where you spend most of your time. But it's hard to say exactly. Kevin Garnett is "from" South Carolina in my analysis, although we know he didn't go to college and played high school ball at the Farragut Academy in Chicago. Do we say illinois or chicago "produced" kevin garnett? However, for many players this isn't a problem, they went to high school in the same state they were born. But there are some obvious mistakes - Steve Nash is "from" South Africa in this analysis (born there) when he spent most of his life in British Columbia. I could try to fix this later but for now I'm just going with it. [/code]
(I tend to think of where a player went to high school as being more important than birthplace and I think that it is changing more often as people move more often these days. If you added that detail later it also would be interesting and would allow crosswalk between the two as both are important; but this is still good on its own.)
Adding on to your analysis, I compared % of current players from top 5 producing states- 32% to those states % of total US population- 36%.
Top 13 current producing states: current players 56%, population 59%.
But with 15% now coming from abroad that means the other 37 states are producing 29% of current players but have 41% of US population.
Top 13 producing states production rate / population ratio is 35% higher than rest of states.
Comparing current production to historical production, top 5 states' current production share of 32% is slightly higher than 31% historical; but top 13 producing states current 56% has dipped from 60% historical. Remaining 37 states current is 29%, historical about 32%. So the foreign share gain is basically coming out of the share of all but the top 5 producing states which are essentially holding onto their share.
International representation in current NBA is now almost twice the historical level.
I'll note a few more things within the top 13 producers. By far the highest current production/population ratio is Mississippi (4 times national average), twice that of next best Louisiana and Illinois and then it gets closer from there. Michigan NY PA OH also do well above average. CA TX FL have big production in terms of total number of current players but it is mostly due to the large populations and they are only 10-20% overrepresented by ratio. And while Kentucky and Indiana have lost their historical overrepresentation from more than double the national production/population ratio, they still contribute about 3% of current players and their share of US population is about 3.4%. Not bad, proportionate, but their regional ranking and importance has slipped.
LA/MS have taken a more prominent spot. Part of the explanation for this geographic tilt from historicl to current is the NBA game (and NCAA) eventually moved to a more integrated and then fully integrated league and apparently the talent from all of the community in those deep south states is now getting fully used whereas it wasnt as much in the first third of the league's history. The rise of huge salaries (and also the glory) helped make playing pro basketball a very competitive, relatively equal intensity across the nation pursuit and later global.
With 375 NBA jobs filled domestically and close to 40 million US men 18-36 yrs old that is about one spot per 100,000. If you are under 6 foot the odds much much lower. Over 6-4 or 6-8 much better. But for the rest of the world the current rate of earning a spot is about 1 in 8 million males that age. Over time we will probably see a lot more from the still undertapped rest of the world.
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