Yeah, yeah, I know. You read the title and immediately knew the number-one answer. It’s not exactly a surprise to anyone who has paid attention to the NBA this season, and I certainly made no attempt to hide it with my choice of thumbnail. Statistics don’t have to be surprising, though – let’s dive into the numbers anyway.
Background
Reddit is a popular social media network split into various communities based on different interests. Each community is known as a subreddit and they’re referred to with the prefix ‘r/’ before the community name. There’s a subreddit out there for anything you can think of. For example, you can browse r/sports for general sports discussion or r/soccer for general soccer discussion. Even more specifically, you can browse r/barca for news and discussion specifically pertaining to F.C. Barcelona.
In this article, we’ll focus on the NBA subreddit (r/nba), which is the most popular sport-specific community on the website.
At the time of this article being written, r/nba has over 4.6 million subscribers. r/soccer is the next closest sport-specific subreddit but still has more than one million fewer subscribers than r/nba. It is one of the most active communities on Reddit and is constantly buzzing with basketball discussion.
After every NBA game, any user can submit a post onto r/nba called a “Post Game Thread.” A typical post game thread (PGT) has a title including the two teams who played, the score of the game, and perhaps any other significant details (like a particularly outstanding individual performance). As an example, the title of the post game thread after today’s game between the Timberwolves and Grizzlies was titled “The Minnesota Timberwolves (1-0) pull out the Game 1 road win against the Memphis Grizzlies (0-1), 130-117, behind a 36 point playoff debut from Anthony Edwards.” The content of the post includes the box score for the game and it currently has 1531 comments as users discuss the game. Users can also upvote or downvote the post – a submission’s score is determined by subtracting the upvotes from the downvotes. The MIN-MEM post game thread has a score of 5781 with an upvote ratio of 97% (so 97% of the votes were upvotes, the other 3% were downvotes).
The goal of this article is to analyze post game threads from every game this season in order to determine which teams’ losses receive more positive attention that their wins. A year ago, I conducted the same analysis regarding the 2019-20 season. It was a rather simple project – for any given team, I obtained the median score of a post game thread in their wins and their losses and subtracted the two values. This year, I wanted to make the analysis more complex.
Methodology
I started by obtaining as many post game threads from the 2020-21 season as I could using the PushShift API on Python. If the original poster of a post game thread deleted the post after the fact (or their account was deleted), it was not included in this analysis. Thus, the data set is not fully complete. In the end, we obtained a post game thread for 73.2% of 2020-21 regular season games.
The next step was to collect relevant characteristics for these games that I thought may affect how high the score would be. This includes the difference in score, whether the game goes to overtime, the Vegas odds (so as to determine whether the game was an upset), whether the game went to overtime, etc. In addition, I included time variables like day of the week and hour of the day which may impact how many viewers a game had. Finally, a regression was ran using these independent variables to predict the dependent variable of a post game thread’s score.
Now we could turn to the 2022 regular season. I obtained 1117 post game threads (accounting for 90.8% of games played) along with the aforementioned relevant variables that may affect a post game thread’s final score. Then the previous regression was used to predict the score for each game and the actual score was subtracted from this value to represent the “score over expectation” (SOE).
The median SOE was calculated for each team in their wins and losses and these values were subtracted to determine their median SOE difference. A positive value suggests that their wins received more upvotes than their losses, while a negative value suggests that their losses were more well-received. Note: a logarithm was applied to the dependent variable to deal with heteroskedasticity.
Results
In the graph below I’ve plotted each team’s median SOE difference along with their win percentage.
In general, teams that win more receive more attention for their losses. That makes sense – the Suns were clearly the best team in the NBA in the regular season, so it’s bigger news when they lose games compared to their wins. The biggest tanking teams like the Rockets and Thunder receive more upvotes when they won, which also makes sense – a Houston win wasn’t exactly a common occurrence. The disparity isn’t as drastic as it is for winning teams like the Suns, though – teams don’t really care all that much about the worst teams in the league.
There are some winning teams that get more love for their wins than their losses. The Raptors and Cavaliers are the most obvious ones in this category, likely due to their great performance relative to preseason expectations. It was hard not to enjoy the Cavaliers’ success with a young core of Garland, Mobley, and Allen even with an incredibly injury-riddled season. It’s also not surprising to see the Warriors get more positive attention for wins than for losses. Despite being a recent dynasty, the Warriors somehow felt like a bit of comeback story due to their lack of success over the past two seasons. And of course, Steph Curry is one of the most beloved players in the NBA.
On the other side, the Nets lacked a spectacular record yet received far more attention for their losses than their wins. Why? Well, they entered the season with championship expectations and a big three of Kyrie Irving, James Harden, and Kevin Durant. Naturally, most fans are gonna be rooting against them.
There are also some variables that are unaccounted for. A big one is whether a comeback occurred. The Utah Jazz were extraordinarily adept at choking away large leads in the second half of games. If the Jazz lose a game in which they held a 25 point second half lead, obviously there will be more post game discussion than if they had lost in “normal” fashion.
Of course, the biggest thing that stands out is the Los Angeles Lakers – right there in the bottom center of the graph. A subpar team that everyone likes to see lose more than any other team.
The Los Angeles Lakers
The graph above clearly showed that the disparity in score for post game threads corresponding to Lakers wins and losses was greater than that for any other team despite their incredible mediocrity as a team. That’s not exactly a surprise, Let’s look into the numbers a bit more, though.
Shown below is a box plot of the score of post game threads after Lakers wins and after Lakers losses.
Only one Lakers win prompted a post game thread that had a higher score (4914) than the average post game thread for a Lakers loss. All it took was a 56 point performance from LeBron James against the Warriors in a tight win. And there were still 19 Lakers losses that led to post game threads with a higher score than that incredible game. An interesting parallel is a Bucks win on November 17th where Giannis dropped 47/9/3 against a LeBron-less Lakers team. This thread hit a score of 5635, 721 points higher than the LeBron 56 point performance over the Warriors. Why?
Some theorize that having a larger fanbase can drive positive narratives surrounding that team on the NBA subreddit. However, the Lakers have the largest fanbase in the league. Even though the Bucks are coming off of a championship, the size of their Internet following is meager relative to the Lakers’. However, the Lakers-Warriors post game thread had a 94% upvote ratio versus 96% for the Bucks-Lakers thread. One may point out that the Warriors also have an incredibly large fanbase that may have actually downvoted the post game thread for their team losing. By that logic, though, Lakers fans could do the same for the Bucks loss.
It seems that the factor that actually matters is what other fans think of a team. The Lakers aren’t a big enough fanbase to outweigh the hate that virtually every other fanbase has for their team.
We all know the Lakers aren’t exactly a team that’s widely adored among NBA fans. Most fans can be grouped into one of two categories: Lakers fans or Lakers haters. Our previous analysis from the 2020 season found that the Lakers were also the team that r/nba users enjoyed seeing lose the most. That was a bit different, though – the Lakers ended up winning the NBA Finals and were clearly a contender. The opposite was true this season – despite massive expectations, the Lakers fell short and ended up not only missing the playoffs, but even falling short of qualifying for the play-in tournament. Perhaps falling completely short of preseason expectations added to the enjoyment fans got out of seeing the Lakers lose.
Of course, there’s also the LeBron factor. Most fans know that LeBron James is one of the most polarizing figures in sports – he perhaps has more “haters” than any other athlete in the four major American pro sports leagues. It’s no surprise to see that hate translate to the team he plays for.
Last time I did a project aimed at answering this question, I wasn’t fully satisfied with the results due to the lack of variables accounted for. This time around, I’m more content with the depth of analysis done and I think the results speak for themselves.