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Professional Sports Research Paper

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To hundreds of millions of people sports act as way to escape reality, and connect to something greater themselves. Sports fan bases are many times the most passionate groups of people in the teams they support. Fans also drive the engine that fuels the business side of any major sporting league, as we constantly pour our dollars into the product they produce. And just like any other product, each league has many different brands, in the form of their teams; all of whom are competing against each other as business as much so, if not more, than on the field of play. You can quickly find a vast number of scholarly articles written about the trends between court performance and revenues of individual players, and teams; however, those articles …show more content…

While it is true the most of a team’s revenue is brought in by their own fans, a portion of it comes from those who just casually watch the team for one reason or another. If you have followed the NBA for the past few years, you have probably noticed that a wave of Golden State Warriors fans have all of a sudden appeared everywhere. Of course they watch because Golden State is a historically good team, but also extremely fun to watch. So fun in fact that hardcore fans of other teams will watch them play if they are on TV, or pay to see them if they are in Oakland. So the casual observer is not just the casual watcher of the NBA, it is also hardcore viewer who follow the entire league, but just watch all but their favorite view teams casually. These types of viewers look for different things in the brand of a team than both marketers and hardcore fans, they look specifically at the product on the court. For example the disparity between the Sacramento Kings value compared to revenue, and the Minnesota Timberwolves is likely that outside observer finds the Timberwolves basketball more appealing. Both teams are not that great at this point in time, both are in small to medium markets, and both have superstar appeal. But Sacramento played at an extremely fast pace, the fastest in the league per Hollinger’s Team Stats on ESPN.com, which is usually a good thing, but in this case tired out their best players, led to injuries, and made them into one of the worst defensive teams in the league. The Timberwolves on the other hand player somewhat fast, but not obsessively so, have a ton of young talent with star potential, and played good team basketball. The only thing holding them back was their youth. Granted I admit that this case wouldn’t hold up for most teams as a trend, it just goes to show that in the chaos of

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