The Lakers Are One of the Most Beloved (And Most Hated) Teams in Sports

The LA Lakers are facing off against the Miami Heat in this year’s NBA Finals, and Ranker readers aren’t surprised. Our Who Will Be The 2020 NBA Champions? list was published back in August 2019, and nearly 34,000 votes later, not once have the Lakers fallen below #2. They took the #1 spot on Halloween last year and held it until voting on the list was closed in January 2020. 

You might guess from those results that Ranker’s readership has plenty of Lakers fans — after all, the team is #1 on our list of Your Favorite NBA Basketball Teams, a list voted on by almost 25,000 people. But if that’s the case, why are the Lakers also #1 on our list of Basketball Teams With The Most Annoying Fans? Our data suggests that the Lakers, rather than being just straightforwardly popular, are one of the most divisive teams in sports.

This map displays the popularity of the Lakers among Ranker readers across the country — the more blue an area is, the more popular the Lakers are among voters there, and the more red a given area is, the more hated they are by voters in that region. As you can see, the only blue-ish area here (purple, since it’s only moderately positive) is the West Coast, where 57% of Ranker sports fans approve of the Los Angeles Lakers. 

It’s hard to blame any sports team for not generating a lot of enthusiasm outside of its home region. Still, 57% is hardly a commanding majority. That underwhelming home court advantage is probably due to the influence of competing West Coast fan bases, including the nearby Sacramento Kings. Ranker Insights says that those who support the Kings are more likely to actively dislike the Lakers than the average Ranker voter. 

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The Kings fans aren’t the only Laker haters in the basketball world: according to Insights, there are nine NBA teams with fans who think negatively of the LA club, including the Detroit Pistons, the Washington Wizards, the Indiana Pacers, and the Dallas Mavericks. It’s clear that the team attracts a lot of negative attention from NBA fans all over the country, not just those in the Western Conference. 

In fact, the teams that are most likely to share fans with the Lakers aren’t even part of the NBA. Insights says that fans of the LA Dodgers and the New York Yankees are more likely than any other sports fandoms to love the Lakers. The Dodgers share a hometown with the Lakers, but the Yankees are on the other side of the country — the only thing they have in common with the Lakers is their status as an iconic franchise that sports fans love to hate. The Dodgers, Lakers, and Yankees seem to share fans who love teams that win, even if they don’t happen to play in the city they’re from. 

The Lakers are certainly the favorites to take the championship this year, but there’s no telling what will happen in an unpredictable NBA season that was nearly derailed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Regardless of the results, however, we don’t think that people will stop feeling strongly about the LA Lakers any time soon.

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These stories are crafted using Ranker Insights, which takes over one billion votes cast on Ranker.com and converts them into actionable psychographics about pop culture fans across the world. To learn more about how our Ranker Insights can be customized to serve your business needs, visit insights.ranker.com, or email us at insights@ranker.com.