Portland Trail Bloggers

So you want your kid to be an NBA player? Well maybe you should consider moving before they are born. I have been crunching the numbers to discover what are the best (and worst) NBA cities for producing NBA players (i.e. the player was born there). I am only using active players in this analysis and am going by what the players list as their birth place. That means if a player lists Compton, CA then they are from Compton, not Los Angeles. This factor really only comes in play for Los Angeles, Phoenix and New York, since there are so many sub-cities of great size.

So here are the top three cities in terms of the number of current NBA players:

     1) Chicago (17)

     2) Philadelphia (12)

     3) Dallas (10)

There are seven NBA cities with just one NBA player:

     - Boston

     - Minneapolis

     - Phoenix

     - Sacramento

     - San Antonio

     - Toronto

     - Salt Lake City

And two NBA cities with no NBA players:

     - Charlotte

     - New Jersey (Jersey City)

But let’s get back to the main point here, you want your kid to be an NBA player! Well, then we should consider the populations of each city to determine the odds that a baby born in a given NBA city will end up playing in the NBA.

Here are the five cities with the best odds:

      1) New Orleans (1 NBA player per 60000 people)

      2) Atlanta (1 NBA player per 65000 people)

      3) Oakland (1 NBA player per 100000 people)

      4) Orlando (1 NBA player per 114000 people)

      5) Milwaukee (1 NBA player per 120400 people)

The worst cities, in terms of odds:

     26) Phoenix (1 NBA player per 1552000 people)

     27) New York (1 NBA player per 2068500 people)*

     28) Toronto (1 NBA player per 2500000 people) 

     T29) Charlotte (0 players)

     T29) New Jersey (0 players)

* If you consider all of the different burrows of New York then their results would be quite different. I think it’s debatable if the burrows are cities themselves or part of one large city. For interests sake, I used the pure New York City population, which does not consider the surrounding cities, but just the true urban city population.

Here is the complete list of cities, number of players, % of NBA population, city population and the odds: