Now that we have two more years of attendance data, I thought that I would return to this topic of NBA average home attendance again. To do so I am analyzing the two seasons before the lockout, the lockout season and the two seasons after the lockout. As I did in the blog linked in the paragraph above, I will use a t test (assuming unequal variance) on the data that I collected from ESPN's NBA attendance webpage. As a reminder, I will be analyzing average NBA home attendance since the lockout and non-lockout seasons have different total games played and thus different total attendance. I am not interested in whether total attendance is different, but whether fans are going at different rates when the games are played. For those interested in total team attendance, I have included this at the end of this blog.
Running the numbers results in the same conclusion: average NBA home attendance is not statistically different in either post lockout season compared to average NBA home attendance of the lockout year. Statistically average NBA attendance is not different when comparing the lockout year to the two seasons before or after the lockout.
Here is a chart of the average home attendance data since the 2009/2010 NBA season.
In terms of total home attendance, there is a statistically significant difference in the year before the lockout and the lockout season and also comparing the lockout season and the season after using a t test assuming unequal variance.
For those interested, here is a chart of total NBA home attendance for those five seasons.
