Buying the hype? Assessing the impact of top-drafted rookies on spectator attendance in the NBA

ABSTRACT

Recent sports economics literature has focused on ‘superstar effects,’ or the independent impact of certain exceptional players on fan attendance at live events. This paper investigates the effect of top-drafted rookies on game attendance in the National Basketball Association from the 2012–13 through 2018–19 seasons. Hypothesizing that the nature of modern basketball could lend unique popularity to top draft picks during their rookie seasons, I find that the presence of top-ten draftees on both home and visiting teams is associated with average increases between 150 and 190 spectators per game throughout the second half of their rookie seasons. These marginal effects are statistically indistinguishable from the impact of an additional All-Star player on the visiting team. Unlike previous work, the censored regression model used in this paper accounts for teams’ use of standing room to generate attendance beyond their listed arena capacities, a relevant consideration in over a quarter of the 8,594-game sample.

KEYWORDS:

• Attendance demand
• superstar effects
• competitive balance
• censored regression model

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• L83
• D00

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ While Gitter and Rhoads (2011) have analysed the impact of top baseball prospects on attendance in minor league games, this study examines the novel hypothesis that former top prospects, after gaining popularity from performance in the minor leagues, generate attendance premiums in professional games.

² I employ published attendance data to proxy for fans’ behavioural intentions to attend a certain game. Such data do not account for season ticket purchases and free tickets distributed to corporate sponsors, which may distort the published figures. While recent methodological breakthroughs have allowed authors to explore accurate behavioural data (e.g. Frevel and Schreyer 2020; Schreyer, Schmidt, and Torgler 2019), such information is scarce and I, unfortunately, cannot control for the number of distributed free and season tickets.