Rank the last 15 nba championship teams in likeability to the average fan

[Colbinii]

I would like to point out: Most people don't like Amazon but it is the most popular avenue for purchasing items.

[Doctor MJ]

I think likeability is a weighing of popularity vs amount of contempt against them. I see 2016 Cavs and the 09/10 Lakers as a middle ground of teams that had a lot of fans as well as quite some people wanting to see them fail. The Heatles and KD Warriors had plenty of fans but they were also public enemy number 1 for the rest of the league. 2011 Mavs on the other hand are spoken about almost exclusively in a favorable way but I do think it might be a fair criticism to say that could also be influenced by us looking back at it now instead of properly taking into account the sentiment at the time.

If the Mavs are at the top of the list, then popularity clearly doesn't matter and you're going simply based on how irritated people are at the team, which is just about directly proportional to how good they are.

The key then to the Mavs success with approach is that they weren't better at basketball, and thus avoided the sin of winning more titles in a dominant fashion that would have driven dialogue in broader popular culture, and thus made hard core fans sick of hearing about how amazing they were.

I might suggest that instead of calling this "likeability" better words would be "apathy" or "irrelevance".

(I do want to be clear: Y'all's feelings as hard-core fans are quite understandable here. The vast majority of music that sells in large quantities doesn't appeal to me that much and thus I have a long standing tendency toward irritation at the latest boy band or teen queen, but I do try not to confuse my irritation as something that is relevant to average music fans. I may have pride in being a weirdo, but I know that I'm the weird one, not the masses.)

Eh, I think you're being reductive here. Likeability is not necessarily synonymous with popularity or "culturally impactful". That doesn't mean popularity is irrelevant, but the ratio of "like to dislike" also matters.

One way to frame things is to see popularity as "volume" and how "liked" something is as "efficiency". And I think it's fair to argue teams should at least have a positive like to dislike ratio. Very doubtful that applies to the 2017 or 2018 Warriors, and the average fan is probably more ruthless than the PC Board or even the media on that front.

For a non-sports example, DBZ is probably the most popular anime, but polls consistently have shown that NGE is the most "loved". Pengu is probably the most popular cartoon across the world, but I very much doubt it's the most "liked"

Getting back to basketball, A common correlate with being less "likeable" is the idea of a team being "stacked" which is commonly assessed by looking at the reputation of the best players or looking at what a team was doing before/after an addition. The 2014 Spurs were also really dominant, but because it wasn't centered around an all-time-great superstar, the Spurs are both iconic(most common pep barca analog) and very well-liked. So well liked in fact, that the 2014 Spurs "beautiful basketball" basically washed away people's distaste for their "dirty" and "boring" approach from the 2000's. "Pretty much directly proportional to how good a team is" is just an oversimplfication.

So first: I think it's good you look to lay out precisely what you believe "likeability" means, but would emphasize that this wasn't specified up front.

But I think the more significant point pertains to the whole "teams should have at least a positive like to dislike ratio", when we know full well that people tend to cheer for underdogs as a matter of course and tend to get progressively more polarized in their perspective on favorites who keep winning.

As I said before: If the '11 Mavs are at the top of this thing, it's not because the Dallas Mavericks were intensely likeable, but because of the fact that they were not expected to win and never won again. Is this really something that a franchise "should" be going for? I don't think so.

Your mention of the 2014 Spurs is noteworthy because I agree that that they were possibly the most beautiful champ I've ever seen. Consider the Game 1 TV ratings from the Finals in that year compared to the years around it:

2010 - 14.09M
2011 - 15.17M
2012 - 16.20M
2013 - 14.24M
2014 - 14.85M
2015 - 17.77M
2016 - 19.20M
2017 - 18.74M
2018 - 17.67M
2019 - 13.38M

Note the relative apathy when the Spurs are involved both years. If there was something really tangibly positive in the effect of the Spurs playing beautiful basketball, shouldn't we have at least seen it in 2014 when they were coming back the next year?

In reality, the basketball world was much more excited about the 2015 Warriors than the 2014 Spurs, and not because they were existing Golden State Warrior fans, because those basically didn't exist - the Warriors were seen as an absolute joke in the Bay Area compared to the other major local sports franchises.

This to say, I think we have some things backwards if "likeability" seems to correlate inversely with the ability to get people to tune in for the NBA Finals.

I can't help but thing about College Basketball's March Madness. There you have a tournament which often peaks in the early rounds as people cheer for every underdog possible...but then no one really cares about the Final Four if there aren't any big stars or dominant teams involved. The underdogs are the ones who would score highest on this "likeability" measure, but they aren't the recipe for maximum engagement in the end.

I've previously talked about this through the lens of the concept of "Information Gain". In any given game, the unexpected outcome feels like it yields more new information, but the more the outcome of any given game/series/championship feels like it's determined by chance, the less it yields.

For College Basketball the trade off is worth it particularly now that there's a good chance that none of the players in the Final 4 will be important in the NBA (of course the WNBA is a different matter). The gimmick that is March Madness is basically what's keeping College Basketball afloat.

For the NBA though, extreme parity is a recipe for irrelevance, and again I'll point to the 1970s for reference.

I'll finish with this thought:

I think people are thinking of "the average fan" as someone who is already maximally invested in the outcome of the NBA season either because they a) they are fans of a particular team, or b) they are fans of a particular player. The big problem with this I think is well represented by the ratings I showed above:

These are not the people who are driving growth of the NBA's popularity.

It's true that losing these people hurts popularity, but that's factored into the numbers and if it were a big enough factor to actually cause a net decrease in popularity, we'd see it.

And yes I understand that folks here are trying to say what we're talking about isn't popularity, but if this "likeability" category actually correlates negatively with things like TV ratings, then I don't think it really means what people think it means, and I don't think the label "likeability" really works like it does in other domains.

If "likeability" can mostly be determined by the absence of "haters", then emphasizing the word "like" seems to be putting things backwards.

[Texas Chuck]

06 wade n shaq was fun

Too soon mate, too soon.

[Texas Chuck]

As I said before: If the '11 Mavs are at the top of this thing, it's not because the Dallas Mavericks were intensely likeable, but because of the fact that they were not expected to win and never won again. Is this really something that a franchise "should" be going for? I don't think so.

So I asked this earlier itt and nobody really responded, but I am quite interested in other perspectives. But I recall the NBA universe very much falling in love with Dallas(okay mainly Dirk probably) and not just as an anti-Miami thing, but with what they were doing in the West which was super impressive. I think the Mavs during that run were very likable, weren't they?

I agree they weren't expected to win prior to the season, but this was one of the best teams in the league and from the jump. They won at well over a 60 win pace in games Dirk played(2-9 when he missed), they remain the only team in NBA history to end 3 different 10 game winning streaks(showing they were beating good teams and when they were rolling). Make no mistake, appearance or not, Dallas should have been seen as a serious contender. They were a legit and worthy champion, not some plucky underdog led by a star having his moment.

And again, you are making too much of where the title fall in their run. Dallas didn't try and just win once. Dirk doesn't hurt his knee in 03, they might have won that year, certainly would have been a fav over the Nets in the Finals. 06 what if Wade just mails in down 15 late in game 3 staring needing to win 4 games in a row? What if Dallas beats GSW late in 07 knocking them out of the playoffs completely?

Dallas didn't set out to just win one title and had 4 very worthy championship level teams while being really good in the "down" years. I would say the Dirk era Mavs are exactly what NBA teams should be going for. I mean sure for the Lakers or Celtics that run is nothing special. But 80% of the league would kill to have a stretch like that.

[Doctor MJ]

As I said before: If the '11 Mavs are at the top of this thing, it's not because the Dallas Mavericks were intensely likeable, but because of the fact that they were not expected to win and never won again. Is this really something that a franchise "should" be going for? I don't think so.

So I asked this earlier itt and nobody really responded, but I am quite interested in other perspectives. But I recall the NBA universe very much falling in love with Dallas(okay mainly Dirk probably) and not just as an anti-Miami thing, but with what they were doing in the West which was super impressive. I think the Mavs during that run were very likable, weren't they?

I agree they weren't expected to win prior to the season, but this was one of the best teams in the league and from the jump. They won at well over a 60 win pace in games Dirk played(2-9 when he missed), they remain the only team in NBA history to end 3 different 10 game winning streaks(showing they were beating good teams and when they were rolling). Make no mistake, appearance or not, Dallas should have been seen as a serious contender. They were a legit and worthy champion, not some plucky underdog led by a star having his moment.

And again, you are making too much of where the title fall in their run. Dallas didn't try and just win once. Dirk doesn't hurt his knee in 03, they might have won that year, certainly would have been a fav over the Nets in the Finals. 06 what if Wade just mails in down 15 late in game 3 staring needing to win 4 games in a row? What if Dallas beats GSW late in 07 knocking them out of the playoffs completely?

Dallas didn't set out to just win one title and had 4 very worthy championship level teams while being really good in the "down" years. I would say the Dirk era Mavs are exactly what NBA teams should be going for. I mean sure for the Lakers or Celtics that run is nothing special. But 80% of the league would kill to have a stretch like that.

It's not that I'd call the '11 Mavs unlikeable so much as that I'd say that they are were more noteworthy for their non-hate than they were for actually stoking interest in basketball.

Re: "should have been seen as a serious contender...not some plucky underdog". I'd agree and said so at the time, yet would say that they were seen as a plucky underdog by the broader basketball world.

Re: "Dallas didn't try and just win once", right, and had they actually achieved everything they hoped to achieve, then they'd be ranked as unlikeable in this thread, which is why I'd suggest that it doesn't really make sense to look at this "likeability" measure as a target.

Re: "80% of the league would kill to have a stretch like that", they sure would, and wouldn't give a damn if that meant polarizing fans of other teams against them, just like the Mavs would have been perfectly content polarizing even more fans against them if it meant more chips.