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First day on the job 💼

First day on the job 💼

SportsBall #37

Riley Martin
May 17, 2024

Happy Friday! Yet another busy week in the sports world with NBA and NHL playoffs, WNBA kickoff, and much more. Today we have:

🏀🏟️🧮 Number crunching the WNBA
🎥🏈🎮 NFL schedule release videos
🏎️🛩️🏀 Do I really need to go to Indianapolis?

SPORTSBALLTOK 🎥

If you’re more of a visual learner, we bring this newsletter to life in our most recent video below. Follow us on TikTok and Instagram to get a look behind the scenes and see Riley’s couch breakdowns.

@riley.makes.charts
Whats behind the Caitlin Clark effect? We break down the wnba vs nba attendance and ticket prices for the upcoming wnba season. Plus baske... See more

LEARNING MODULE 💡

First day on the job 💼

Caitlin Clark’s much anticipated first professional basketball was Tuesday night where she scored 20 points and her Fever lost to the Connecticut Sun. ☀️

We’ve heard a lot about the “Caitlin Clark Effect” recently as she’s expected to single-handedly pull the WNBA back to turn-of-the-century popularity. Tuesday was a good start.

2.1 million people tuned in to watch the contest, the most viewers for a WNBA game in almost 21 years and beating out the NHL Playoffs on the same night.

But there’s something weird happening with ticket prices for Indiana Fever games. 🤔

Going to the game vs. the Sun on Tuesday would have cost you a minimum of $116 for the cheapest ticket - this is called the “get-in price” for a game. 💰 For context, the get-in price for the Super Bowl was $6,944, and around $640 for the upcoming Knicks game at MSG.

$116 is still a pretty penny. You could buy half of a Ninja Creami 🍦, 5.5 months of ChatGPT 🤓, or 47 Diet Cokes 🥤 with that kinda cash. When we look at the rest of Caitlin Clark’s season, there’s a very interesting trend with the prices of her games.

When playing away games, the average get-in price will be $139 for Fever games. At home, it’s only $27… Why the big difference?

There are two reasons for the disparity. ⬇️

Market Size 🌆

It’s no secret Indianapolis isn’t the biggest market in the world. Cities like Chicago, New York, LA, and Vegas will always have more demand for games leading to higher prices.

For example, the get-in prices to the Fever games in Chicago are $375 and $224, reviving the Battle of Indiana rivalry.

Clark will only travel to other cities 2 or 3 times each for games this year and the scarcity of those contests will increase the demand/prices for tickets.

Stadium Capacity 🏟️

The Indiana Fever will play in an almost 18K seat arena for 20 home games this year which is 3X the average attendance of WNBA games last year.

Thats nets out to roughly 240,000 extra seats getting filled by Caitlin at home, a tall task even by her standards. With so much supply, prices will be low and fans will have more opportunity than ever to see her play.

It isn’t just the home team hoping for a boost in attendance, opponents around the league are shifting locations to make room for Caitlin Clark’s arrival. 🛬

🚚 The Washington Mystics are moving their Fever game to Capital One Arena, the 20,000-seat venue that’s 5X the size of their own 4,200-seat arena.
🚚 The Las Vegas Aces are moving their Fever game from their 12,000-seat arena to T-Mobile arena, the 18,000-seat home of the city’s NHL team.
🚚 The Chicago Sky are trying to move their Fever games from their current 10,000-seat arena to the United Center, the 21,000-seat venue where the Bulls play.

What does all this mean for the WNBA?

We did some back-of-the-napkin math 🧮 to estimate the true scale of the Caitlin Clark effect.

If nothing else changed in the WNBA attendance for other teams and only Caitlin Clark games sold out (18,000 fan estimate), the league would average 8,513 fans per game.

That would be a 29% bump from last year’s average 😳 and the highest mark since 2005 thanks solely to Caitlin. It also assumes the rest of the league remains stagnant which surely won’t be the case.

The Caitlin Clark effect is very real. There has likely never been another instance of potential growth this large in a league thanks to one person and we’re here to watch what happens. 📕

EXTRAS 🍿

If you’re looking for your team’s soul sister across professional leagues, look no further. @Brooks_Gate mapped league equivalent winning percentages and we can safely say row 2 is nightmare fanbase territory.

MLB, NBA, and NFL team equivalents
based on winning % last 10 years
— BrooksGate (@Brooks_Gate)
1:29 AM • May 13, 2024

An inspiration in data visualization, @JayCuda gives the less is more approach to venn diagrams.

are u the worst american league team this month
— Jay Cuda (@JayCuda)
9:33 PM • May 13, 2024

The NFL schedule release was this week and a new trend is for teams to put together insane videos to announce their upcoming games. Here are the best ones this year. ⬇️