My apologies to those of you who are big fans of basketball. Since it is not really my sport of choice, I had no idea that March Madness started yesterday. Otherwise, I would have posted this earlier.
FiveThirtyEight analysed the locations of basketball conferences’ tournaments relative to the geographic centres of said conferences. As it turns out many conferences do not play near their centre. The article goes on to suggest cities near their conference centre.
As a geography nerd, I found the whole exercise fascinating. I only have a few peccadillos with this. I would have loved to see a follow-up map with their suggested locations plotted against the centre and the actual tournament location.
Secondly, the first three maps highlight how the tournaments are being played in New York. But in the first they label it as Brooklyn. Then the next two just use NYC. Since Brooklyn is part of New York, why use Brooklyn instead of NYC? Or instead of NYC, use Manhattan.
Again, my apologies for not realising this should have been up earlier this week. So for those of you who do participate in the bracket challenges, hopefully your brackets are still more or less intact. And best of luck with the rest of the tournament.
Credit for the piece goes to Neil Paine and Ella Koeze.
