Unlike the soccer-loving socialists populating Europe and Latin America, Americans demand hierarchy from our sports. Outside of the occasional football game, American athletic contests don’t produce ties; they produce winners and losers. And our sports media produce rankings. Lots and lots of rankings.
Seemingly every outlet with a sports section issues weekly “power rankings,” which serve the purpose of comparing teams that may not have played (and may never play) against each other. During the season, weekly fantasy football player rankings are almost as ubiquitous. Meanwhile, in preparation for the return of the NBA, USA Today is currently ranking basketball teams by “Watchability.” And ESPN recently published rankings of NBA teams by the players on their rosters under the age of 25, as well as rankings of the top 20 seasons by pitchers in the past 50 years. Grantland has been both an enthusiastic participant in (and a parodist of) the phenomenon, publishing rankings of everything from NBA, NFL, and MLB players’ trade values to the karma of teams entering the NBA draft lottery to the unsolicited life advice that has been offered to hard-partying Cleveland Browns quarterback Johnny Manziel.
It bears noting that these rankings are not the sports equivalent of listicles. The ordering of a listicle does not imply hierarchy. For instance, though they are placed at numbers 3 and 4 respectively, this NFL.com list does not necessarily imply that Matt Asiata is a better addition to your fantasy football team than Brian Quick. Which player is preferable depends on whether your team needs a running back or a wide receiver.
On the other hand, the whole point of Sports Illustrated’s ranking of the Top 100 NBA players was to determine which of the best basketball players are superior. This is how it came to pass that its authors, Ben Golliver and Rob Mahoney, directly suggested that the Clippers’ Blake Griffin is a better player than the Knicks’ Carmelo Anthony. In defense of their decision to rank Anthony the eleventh-best player in the league, they mainly cite the Knicks’ myriad failures as a team, including its failure to make the playoffs. “The Knicks are without any players that are close to being viewed as second or third options,” Golliver and Mahoney write, though, in lathering praise upon Griffin, who is ranked one spot above Anthony, they never mention that he has Chris Paul as a teammate. That is important because, if Griffin did not have Paul as a teammate, the Clippers would be a much worse team, thus exposing Griffin to the same criticism the authors use to degrade Anthony. Personally, I would bet a lot of money that, if the Knicks had Chris Paul, they would not only have made the playoffs, but would have at least made it to the second round, which is when the Clippers, with Griffin and Paul, were eliminated.
While those last few sentences may seem tangential, they are not. A big part of the appeal of these rankings is seeing where the players and teams you support have landed. As so many admirers of Kobe Bryant learned last year, after ESPN ranked their hero 25th in its own NBA player rankings, discovering that your favorite player has not received his due can be very disappointing. Since sports fans are not in the habit of keeping their disappointment to themselves, rankings can create widely debated controversies.
Such controversies generate further coverage, as analysts reflect on whether the outrage is justified. “Was #NBARank fair to Kobe Bryant?” ESPN asked a group of five experts plucked from the rankings panel. In a blog post, Ryan Feldman, an ESPN writer not on the rankings panel, insinuated that the relatively low ranking indicated that Kobe had become underrated. By contrast, Patrick Harrel of Princeton Analytics argued that the placement was “more than generous” to the injured superstar, and that Lakers fans were wrong, despite the “primitive” methodology behind the rankings.
ESPN’s methodology for its “Ultimate Standings” is more comprehensive. To determine the “ultimate” team in North America, it used an opinion-research firm to ask more than 100,000 fans to rate their favorite teams in certain categories–from the affordability of tickets to the quality of ownership. (The categories were selected based on the results of another fan survey.) ESPN then used an algorithm to calculate which teams were best at turning money spent into victories, before weighting the various categories and ranking teams based on the resulting averages.
The San Antonio Spurs came in first. It is a testament to the self-hating attitude of tortured Knicks fans that I felt somewhat slighted that my beloved Knickerbockers came in second to last, one spot ahead of the hapless Toronto Maple Leafs. With little chance of victory on the court, distraught fans must seek distinctions where they can find them. Maybe another year of losing will finally grant Knicks fans the right to refer to our team with a superlative, even if it is as the most unsatisfying team in North America.
Christopher Massie is a CJR contributing editor.