In a little over a week, NBA fans will get what they’ve been wishing for for months, the start of this year’s basketball season.
The season starts around the end of October or the beginning of November but this year the season isn’t starting until Christmas Day after the owners locked out the players in July due to a disagreement over a number of money related issues.
On Nov. 25, NBA fans received some good news when the owners and players reached an agreement that bringing back the 2011/12 season (albeit, a bit of a shorter than normal one).
Using MAP, our social media monitoring and analytics platform, I took a look at some of the buzz around the NBA over the past few months. I decided to do my search from September 1 to today because September was about the time it started to look as if the NBA season wasn’t going to start on time.
Since September 1, the NBA mentioned in 331,502 blogs, 381,672 online news articles, 865,524 forum posts and 3.8 million tweets.
Taking those numbers and trending them out over time gives us the popularity chart below. All of the small spikes in activity levels were days when there was some sort of news about the lockout.
For example, the second largest spike on the graph was on November 14 when the players rejected a deal and people really started to believe there would be no basketball this year. The largest spike on the graph, of course, is on November 25 when the players and owners finally came to an agreement on a deal that would get everyone back to work, and allow fans to see a shorter season.
The buzzgraph from this time period shows that “lockout” was definitely the center of conversation. Some of the strongly connected keywords also focus around those involved, such as the “league,” “players,” and David “Stern”, the NBA’s commissioner. We can also see teams and popular players names also appear in the buzzgraph, but a lot of it is talk that happened after November 25.
I also looked at the conversation that have happened since the new collective bargaining agreement was reached. Since November 25, I found 84,633 blog posts, 89,264 online news articles, 252,730 forum posts and 1.4 million tweets mentioning the NBA. That means 37% of the Twitter conversation over the past three and a half months happened in the past three and a half weeks.
When we looked at the buzzgraph for this time period, we can see a lot more team and player names appear. This is because during the lockout, teams weren’t allowed to trade players or sign free agents, so the Web has been abuzz about the action in the past few weeks.
So, who’s ready for some basketball?
