Besides that, the nation also supplies the NBA and various European basketball leagues with a bunch of fantastic players. In recent years, basketball has been gaining a bunch of popularity. With more media coverage, as well as the signing of Brazilian players to the NBA, it is expected that the popularity of basketball will be boosted even further. Basketball was popularized by the American when they introduced it in the early 20th century. The simplicity and accessibility of basketball made it easy for the Philippines to become obsessed with the sport.
The Philippine Basketball Association, the PBA, was founded in , which makes it the first professional basketball league in Asia, as well as one of the oldest in the world. This is one of the best results obtained in the World Cup by an Asian country. Despite being a relatively small country, Serbia has a strong basketball following and is always a strong contender when it comes to international basketball competitions.
When it comes to their national league, the KK Partizan and KK Crvena Zvezda, both from Belgrade, are two of the most successful basketball clubs in the country. After that, the nation has been a strong competitor in major International basketball competitions.
The most successful team in the league, without a doubt, is the Panathinaikos. In Italy, basketball is among the most followed and watched team sports.
Throughout the years, several Italian players have played in the NBA, and many foreigners have joined the Italian league. The two most successful teams are the Olimpia Milano and the Virtus Bologna. When it comes to international competitions, the nation has attained a couple of medals in the Summer Olympics. Then, in the EuroBasket Championship, the national team has achieved the top places in about ten occasions, winning their first title in Although not among the top sports in the country, basketball is, indeed, followed and played by many French people.
Since , French television started to show NBA games. This started a significant growth in the popularity of the sport. However, not only is the sport itself responsible for the increase in popularity. Instead, basketball started to become part of the French pop culture, it began to be incorporated in sneakers and music, thus rising in popularity. The sport really became popular in Greece after the Greek National Team won the European Cup in the year in their home country.
Serbia is another small country in Eastern Europe that has a very strong basketball reputation in European competitions. This makes it one of the most popular sports in the country, even though a national league was only formed in the year They do have a long history of basketball though as part of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia , a country that won numerous European Championships.
The atmosphere in Serbian basketball arenas is very similar to those in football stadiums and can definitely rival those of Greek arenas! The Russian basketball team has built on the successes during the Soviet Era and. The Russian basketball league is also a very strong one in Europe as it also consists of teams of neighboring countries such as Belarus, Estonia, Kazachstan, and Poland. The Chinese basketball team is the dominant force in Asian basketball, resulting in making it the most popular sport in the country.
And that means something as China is the biggest country in the world based on population! That being said, basketball has gained a lot of popularity and is firmly the second-most popular sport in Spain. But in , Stanford undergraduate and data enthusiast Muthu Alagappan decided to remap the positions of NBA players based on seven key statistics rates of point, rebound, block, assist, steal, foul, and turnover production per minute played.
He found that the five traditional positions oversimplify and group very different players together. Several NBA teams have now reached out to Alagappan to use his model in building their own rosters. Despite some struggles over the years — nine of 18 total teams shown as white dots on the map either folded or moved — the WNBA has since grown steadily into a team league with steadily increasing attendance and TV ratings.
Six of those teams are now independently owned, and four play in their own arenas. In , the Phoenix Mercury won the championship, their third title. In the late 60s and 70s, the league began quickly expanding again, giving franchises to the West Coast, Western Canada, the Midwest, and even the South.
Some of these teams folded or moved, but combined with the absorption of four teams from the folded World Hockey Association, this brought the league up to 21 teams, a number that held steady until another wave of southward expansion in the s. The NHL was once a league of mostly American teams filled with Canadian players: in the early s, as much as 98 percent were born in Canada. That is no longer the case. The share of Canadian-born players has fallen over the past few decades as the game has spread, and the current percent of players born in the US Sweden leads the way with 7.
The blue dots show individual tweets, while the redder colors show the percentage of all tweets, but both reveal a much higher level of interest in Canada, as well as northern cities like Minneapolis, Detroit, and Boston. The NHL has spread teams across the southern United States, but increased interest is growing more slowly.
There are thousands of collegiate sport programs in the United States. One thing unites the vast majority of them: they do not have original team names. This enormous chart by Pop Chart Lab is a detailed taxonomy of the most common names in existence — sorting the many birds there are 60 eagle teams alone , the various mammals lions, tigers, and bears, yes, but also stags, camels, and seawolves , and the 24 colleges that simply have colors as their mascots.
Fun fact: there are hundreds of animal team names, but only three schools have named theirs after plants. Go Sycamores! This Deadspin map reveals an absurd truth about the bloated college sports system in the US: in most states, the highest-paid public employee is either a football or basketball coach.
Though most of the money for these huge salaries comes from team revenues, not tax dollars, these big-time college football and basketball programs as a whole are still usually a net financial negative for universities. When Title IX was signed into law in , it banned discrimination on the basis of sex in any educational program that receives federal funding.
One of the biggest impacts of that law has been in college sports — it directs NCAA schools to offer the same athletic opportunities to female as male students, and as a result, the number of female college athletes has skyrocketed.
College sports programs are grouped into roughly geographic conferences — and for most of modern sports history, they never moved.
That time is no longer. Over the past decade or so, the major conferences have played a cutthroat game of realignment, robbing each other of schools and destroying traditional rivalries only to be robbed in turn the next offseason.
This graphic conveys the overwhelming complexity of the changes, but they can be summarized in two words: football and money. In most cases, universities have pulled all their sports teams out of one conference and into another for the purpose of improving their football prospects, and conferences have sought universities based on their ability to help garner bigger TV contracts.
This map, compiled by Facebook at the start of the season based on the number of likes for the top 25 teams, shows the areas dominated by fans of each team.
But there are some exceptions. Oregon has fans across Northern California, rather than Stanford, and Texas fans can be found all across the west. Compare with this more recent New York Times map which also features more schools to look even more closely at the borders that define rivalries. This admittedly unscientific map — it was created based on survey data collected by a Reddit user — still tells us something important about college football: it thrives off a healthy amount of rivalry and hatred.
In general, historically dominant teams like Texas, Ohio State, Michigan, Alabama, and Florida are hated in all states that border their schools. This map was also generated by Facebook, at the start of the NCAA tournament, and shows the team with the most likes in every county — out of the field of 68 teams in the bracket.
Not surprisingly, the map is dominated by big schools which are mostly higher-ranked teams , leaving precious few likes for the Valparaisos and Ionas of the world. Though any NCAA Division 1 university can send a team to the tournament, it has been positively dominated by one state: California. UCLA alone has won 11 out of 32 championships, and the state as a whole has accounted for way more final four appearances than any other.
But recently, the balance of power has shifted south, with Florida and Alabama winning titles in the last three years, and the SEC as a whole accounting for more final four appearances than the Pac over the past seven years. This map shows the number of gold medals both in the winter and summer Olympics won by inhabitants of each state on a per capita basis.
One thing stands out: Montana and Vermont have produced an unusually high number of them. The reason is mainly geologic: both states have the kind of snow-covered mountains that people can grow up skiing and snowboarding on, allowing them a much greater change to become competitive at the international level. Major League Soccer is a pretty new league: it was only founded in , in conjunction with the US hosting the World Cup. And although it still lags behind football and baseball in per-game attendance, the MLS is growing steadily — it now averages just over 18, fans per game, slightly more than the NBA and NHL.
This map shows the locations of the 19 teams in the MLS 16 in the US, and 3 in Canada , along with a number of minor league teams. In addition, the league will add teams in New York City and Orlando for the season, to be followed by Atlanta and Miami in future years.
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