This year’s NBA finals pitting the Dallas Mavericks against the Miami Heat is a rematch of 2006 championship, still it’s just the second time that each team has appeared in the finals. Miami came away victorious in that first matchup; Dallas has yet to claim a title. Will the “Heatles” – Lebron, Wade, Bosh – win the championship they banded together for? Will Mark Cuban, the Mavericks billionaire owner and former Dancing with the Stars contestant, finally get a crown after years of falling short? Which city will get its parade?

But might this budding rivalry signal something bigger at play?  Are we witnessing a shift in the geography of the NBA’s dominant teams?

Others have already speculated on this (here and here).  With the help of my Martin Prosperity Institute colleagues Patrick Adler, Charlotta Mellander and Zara Matheson, I decided to look at the geography of NBA champions over the past six decades spanning 1947 to 2010.

The first map (above) shows the teams that have won the most championships.  With 17 crowns, the Celtics—the team that dominated the 1960s, with an astounding nine titles—are still the winningest franchise by far, followed by the Lakers with 11 (16, if you count the five won by the Minneapolis Lakers). The only other team that approaches them is the Chicago Bulls, with six championships, four of them in the glory days of Michael Jordan. San Antonio (also eliminated this year) has four.  Over the decade just past, a very small number of teams have been dominant.  Since 1999, nine crowns went to either the Lakers or the Spurs, while the Pistons, Heat and Celtics have won one each. And get this: Between them, the Lakers and the Celtics have featured in two-thirds (40 out of 63) of the NBA finals completed to this point. The two have met each other head-to-head for the championship 11 times.

This year, of course, things are different. Dallas swept the Lakers, the defending champs, while Miami vanquished the perennial eastern conference winners the Boston Celtics in the second round, before taking out Chicago in the conference finals.

But championships are biased towards bigger cities, which can afford the best players (though clearly size isn’t everything or New York City would be more dominant than it is). So we controlled for championships per capita, dividing the number of championships won by the population of the metro where the team is located (see second map, below):

Boston is still on top. But San Antonio, with four titles between 1999 and 2007, now takes second place. Interestingly, two smaller market teams from the 1950s tie for third – the Syracuse Nationals, who became the Philadelphia 76ers in 1963, and the Minneapolis Lakers, who moved to Los Angeles in 1960.  LA is sixth, Detroit eighth, and Chicago ninth. For all its money and media-might, New York is at the very bottom, its last titles dating back to the Willis Reed-Walt Frazier-Dave DeBusschere era of the early ‘70s. But San Antonio and the smaller market Syracuse and Minneapolis half a century ago notwithstanding, smaller-market teams and locations do not fare substantially better even on this metric. Which brings me back to my main point.

With LA and Boston both showing signs of age, some believe the league’s two most storied franchises are headed for longer-run decline. I suspect it’s way too early to write their eulogies. While new teams have certainly emerged, those older powerhouses still have much to build on. But what’s even more interesting is how the dynamics of place and talent are shaping not just the make-up of the NBA’s dominant teams, but the strategies that the smaller teams are adopting to combat them.

Location plays a huge and sometimes underestimated role in sports, even more so than in many other more traditional industries. The biggest cities have the biggest markets and the biggest attendance, true—but only up to a point.  Arena size is more or less fixed. Dallas, a big but far from the biggest city, leads the league in attendance and Portland, a medium-sized city, is second. It’s not so much “big” that matters for attendance as “big enough.” Plus, there is a close relationship between attendance and wins in most cases, as my previous post on the playoffs showed.

Where location really matters is in determining where the most talented players end up. In the modern NBA, the location decisions of a few highly talented superstars can have a radical impact on which teams excel and which teams fail. Just look at the turnarounds of the Miami Heat and the New York Knicks this year, and the decline of the Phoenix Suns and Cleveland Cavaliers—two teams that had been perennial playoff participants. Place acts as a key axis of talent attraction—few if any other types of talent are as closely linked to a city and its identity as its sports stars. Look at the fallout over LeBron James’s move from Cleveland to Miami, or perhaps more to the point, Amar’e Stoudemire’s rocket-like ascent to mega-star status when he moved from Phoenix to NYC.

Beyond attendance, larger cities bring something else that is critical to talent’s locational calculus: Franchises in the largest cities not only have the money but the essential media clout required to lure top talent and put together super-teams.  A larger more central media market means a bigger platform, more coverage, and of course the potential for more endorsement deals that make for a more lucrative career.

And the key here is not only the size of the city in which a franchise is located, but the broader metropolitan (or “metro”) region of which it is a part, and increasingly the broader mega-region – complexes of cities and suburbs – in which it is located. Mega-regions are the great economic forces of our time – many rival nations in size and scale. Home to just 18 percent of the world’s population, the globe’s 40 largest mega-regions produce two-thirds of its economic output, and nine in ten of its innovations.  The map (below) charts the location of the leagues 30 franchises by mega-region.  The great Bos-Wash region is home to five teams; Chi-Pitts boast six.  Six other mega-regions are home to two clubs each.  More to the point perhaps, just three NBA franchises – the Oklahoma City Thunder, Memphis Grizzlies, and Utah Jazz – are located outside one of North America’s mega-regions.

Los Angeles, Chicago, and Boston, the sport’s historically dominant franchises, are each located in the country’s biggest regional centers. With 3.7 million people, Los Angeles is the country’s second largest city and the heart of its second largest metro (12.8 million). It is also the hub of the vast So-Cal mega region, which is home to 21.4 million people and generates $730 billion in economic output.  With 2.6 million people, Chicago is the nation’s third largest city; its metropolitan area (9.4 million) is the third largest in the nation; and, it is a hub of the Chi-Pitts mega-region, with 46 million people and $1.6 trillion in economic output. Though Boston is a smaller city today – with a population of just 600,000 – it was a much bigger place relatively speaking in the Celtics heyday back in the fifties and sixties. It is still the hub of a large metro of 4.5 million people, the nation’s tenth largest, and a node in the gigantic Bos-Wash mega-region, which with 54 million people and $2.2 trillion in economic output is the biggest mega-region in the US and the second largest in the world.

All that said, the two current championship contenders, Miami and Dallas are no slouches either, locationally speaking.  Both are major regional centers in the rapidly growing Sunbelt. With a population that’s swelled to 1.9 million people, Dallas has become the country’s 9th largest city and 4th largest metro (6.3 million). It is a hub of the Dal-Austin mega, with 10.4 million people and $370 billion in economic output. As the hub for Southwest and American Airlines, it is a major transportation center and a gateway to the U.S. and Latin America; it is also a magnet for talent (along with Austin, it has become a major tech center) and corporations, having attracted the likes of Comerica, and JC Penney in recent years.

Miami is only the nation’s 44th largest city but it is at the heart of the country’s 8th largest  metro; it is also the hub of the vast and fast growing So-Flo mega, which includes Tampa and Orlando and is home to 15.1 million people and produces $430 billion in economic output. It is a major center for Latin American finance and commerce and a major draw for global talent.

Sure, neither Miami or Dallas are as big as LA or Chicago or New York, but they’re bigger than Boston and they have the locational size, market and media clout to attract top talent. The Big Three chose Miami, as I wrote about here, because it was just the right size – big enough to afford them, but diverse enough, open-minded enough, free-wheeling and hungry enough that they could make their own rules.

This doesn’t mean that smaller-market teams have to give up. The San Antonio Spurs won four titles from 1999 through 2007 with team play and great coaching.  For all his personal flash and bravado, Mark Cuban has more or less followed this model of his mega-region neighbors with the Mavericks, building his team around one great and extremely disciplined talent (Dirk Nowitzki) and a supporting cast of solid role players. Smaller cities like Memphis and Oklahoma City have been following this model with substantial success, and now even the big-market Bulls have taken it up. With its Big Three, Miami (ironically, a much smaller city than Dallas – but perhaps one with more glitz and media throw-weight) has gone in precisely the opposite direction.

The finals are not just a clash of two cities but of two different models for leveraging talent and building successful teams. Which type of team – and which type of city - will win it all?  Pass the popcorn.

Check out this interview.

Here are the featured spaces:

• A Masterful Modern Reno in Historic Georgetown, Washington D.C
  
• Cold Office Space Turns Sweeping, Luxurious Living in Downtown Toronto

“Is your Englishman so expert in his drinking?” asks Cassio in Othello. “Why he drinks you with facility your Dane dead, he gives your Hollander a vomit ere the next pottle can be filled,” Iago replies. Many countries—like many barflies—take perverse pride in their thirsts. Now, thanks to the the World Health Organization’s recent Global Status Report on Alcohol and Health, we can actually find out which countries put away the most booze. The map below shows it graphically; it generated a lot of attention when it was picked up by the Huffington Post.

The full report contains some real surprises. For one thing, Americans are relatively abstemious—the U.S. is only the 56^th most bibulous nation on earth, consuming 9.4 liters of alcohol per person per year, mostly in the form of beer (4.47 liters), plus 1.36 liters of wine and 2.65 liters of spirits. Canada is 48^th, with an average intake of 9.77 liters (4.10 in the form of beer, 1.5 in wine, and 2.10 in spirits).  Moldova, if you’re interested, is number one (18.22 liters!), followed by the Czech Republic (16.45) and Hungary (16.27). Fans of the Bard will be pleased to know that the 17^th ranked English are still more potent potters than either the Danes (who are ranked 18^th) or the Dutch (20^th).

One surprise is that more people abstain than you might expect—almost half of all men and two thirds of women worldwide report that they have not had a drink in the past year. Many of those abstainers, of course, are Islamic.

My team and I decided to take a fun look at these data and use them to examine what factors might be associated with a nation’s propensity to drink. Is drinking more prevalent in poorer or richer countries? Those whose citizens are more or less educated?  How might a nation’s drinking habits be related to its economic structure?  Is drinking more widespread in countries with hard-scrabble blue-collar economies or in those where white-collar knowledge-work is more prevalent?  What about a nation’s happiness: Are people more likely to drink in nation’s where the happiness climate is “down” or might it be that tipsier countries are happier than teetotalers? With the help of my colleague Charlotta Mellander we ran a basic correlation analysis between these and other factors. Our analysis only points to associations between variables; we do not make any claims about causation and note that other factors that we have not looked at might come into play. Still, a number of interesting and in some cases perhaps counterintuitive findings cropped up.

Drinking levels are lower where the prospects for workers are better, or are at least perceived as such. The correlation between alcohol consumption and “good labor market conditions” (the variable is from Gallup surveys) is -.46. At the same time (a bit paradoxically), drinking is more prevalent in richer than in poorer countries. The correlation between alcohol consumption and economic output is .39.

Drinking is more prevalent in nations with highly educated populations.  The correlation between alcohol consumption and human capital was .61, the highest of any in our analysis.

Drinking is more prevalent in white-collar, knowledge-based economies. The correlation between alcohol consumption and the creative class (the share of workers in professional, technical, artistic, creative, health and education jobs) is .45.

Despite the stereotype of blue-collar workers as heavy drinkers (and statistics that back up the idea that they drink more when they are worried about jobs), our analysis did not show a significant correlation between alcohol consumption and the percent of a workforce in blue collar occupations.

Perhaps the most surprising finding in our analysis is that happier nations quaff more than unhappy ones.  Alcohol consumption was systematically higher in happier nations, with a correlation of .31.

What does all this mean? Over-indulgence in alcohol—especially of home-made alcohol—remains a dire health risk. Especially in poorer, less-developed countries, alcohol abuse goes hand in hand with high levels of crime, disease, and early death. But many of the world’s least sober places are also among its richest, most well-educated, happiest and healthiest. “Western European countries have some of the highest consumption rates but their net alcohol-attributable mortality rates are relatively low,” the report reveals.

And this shapes something of a paradox.  When people in poor nations drink, it tends to compound their economic woes and health problems. But for nations whose people can afford it, alcohol (when used in moderation) is more of an indulgence than a vice.

Read about my travel adventures in the business section of today’s New York Times.

It’s that time of the year again: More than 40 million Americans are expected to be traveling on the roads this Wednesday before Thanksgiving, according to AAA – the busiest travel day of the year.

Hope you’re not traveling on one of the roads listed below, from a ranking of the roads with the “slowest typical rush hour” in the United States and Canada. It’s based on data from NAVTEQ, the digital traffic and location data company (via TechCrunch/GreenTech). New York City tops the list, but Montreal is a close second. Philly, L.A., Boston, Dallas, and Toronto make the list.

Freeways with the Slowest Typical Rush Hour

1. New York City – Brooklyn Battery Tunnel (northbound)

2. New York City – Washington Bridge (eastbound)

3. Montreal – AUT-15 (eastbound)

4. Philadelphia – US-202 (southbound)

5. Montreal – RTE-138 (westbound)

6. New York City – Washington Bridge (westbound)

7. Los Angeles – 1-10 (eastbound)

8. Boston – US-1 (northbound)

9. Dallas – TX-366 (eastbound)

10. Toronto – Don Valley Parkway (northbound)

While we’re at it, here’s another list of the cities with the worst rush hour traffic overall:

Cities with the Worst Rush Hours

1. New York

2. Washington, D.C.

3. San Francisco

4. Los Angeles

5. Philadelphia

6. Chicago

7. Dallas – Ft. Worth

8. Atlanta

9. Houston

10. Denver

Being stuck in traffic ranks as one of life’s most miserable experiences, according to researchers who study happiness, and unfortunately too many Americans find themselves spending more time stuck. A new report by urbanist Joe Cortright for CEOs for Cities provides a new ranking of the the nation’s 51 largest metro areas, based on the length of peak-hour commutes and the time commuters spend in peak-hour traffic. Americans living in large metro areas spend an average of 200 hours in peak-hour traffic. But peak-hour travel time varies from more than 250 hours to less than 150 hours across these metros.

The new ranking generates some surprises, especially when compared with other measures of commuting and congestion. Large metros do much better than expected. Even though their roads are notoriously congested, Chicagoans have the least onerous peak hour commute, according to this new metric, and New Yorkers fare well too because their average commutes are shorter. Residents in smaller, more sprawling Sunbelt metros like Nashville, Oklahoma City, Birmingham, Richmond, and Raleigh spend more time in peak-hour traffic because their average commutes are much longer. D.C. ranks 14th and L.A., with its always-clogged freeways, ranks 17th.

To illustrate this point, the report compares the components of the travel time of typical commuter in Chicago and Charlotte. The average Charlotte commuter spends an average of 48 minutes on the road – 38.4 minutes in free-flowing traffic and another 9.6 minutes in traffic delays. The average Chicago commuter spends just 32.6 minutes in total travel time – 22.8 minutes in free-flowing traffic and 9.8 minutes in delays. The reason for the difference boils down to a simple factor: Chicagoans live closer to where they work, with an average commute of 13.5 miles, compared to an average commute of 19 miles for residents in Charlotte.

The key lies in urban form, the report concludes. Denser metros enable more commuters to live closer to where they work, while more sprawling regions cause residents to endure longer trips. The report estimates that if “the top 50 metros followed suit with Chicago” residents would drive “about 40 billion fewer miles per year and use two billion fewer gallons of fuel,” and generate a total costs savings of $31 billion per year.

So, what are America’s busiest airports? Depends on what you measure, it turns out. The U.S. Department of Transportation’s Bureau of Transportation Statistics compiles detailed statistics on America’s airports (via the NYT’s Catherine Rampell).

For domestic flights, Atlanta is the busiest airport, followed by Chicago O’Hare, Dallas-Fort Worth, Denver, and LAX.

Miami takes the top spot for international flights, followed by JFK, Newark, Atlanta, and Houston.

What’s your favorite – and least favorite – airport?

That’s the overwhelming conclusion of a new Gallup-Healthways survey based on telephone interviews with 173,581 employed Americans over the past year.

The first chart shows the toll that commuting takes on physical health. Americans with longer commutes suffer higher levels of back pain, higher cholesterol, and higher levels of obesity.

The second chart shows the toll of commuting on emotional health and happiness. Those who commute more worry more, experience less enjoyment, and feel less well-rested.

Commuting is a health and psychological hazard, not to mention the carnage and wasted time on our over-clogged roads. It’s time to put commuting right beside smoking and obesity on the list of priorities for improving the health and well-being of Americans.

This chart from Gallup shows the dramatic growth in the percentage of Americans who want to see smoking banned in public venues.

Over at The Transport Politic, Yonah Freemark accuses me of making too much of a case for high-speed rail:

Setting aside the positives and negatives of fast trains for now, my biggest qualm with Florida’s argument is his sense that the megaregion will produce the “Concentration and clustering [that] are the underlying motor forces of real economic development.” He cites the Boston-Washington and Char-lanta regions as examples of these megaregions, which he says “Will do more than anything to wean us from our dependency on cars…”

Though there was been an increase in the number of residents living in the dense cities along the corridor (those that Florida implies need to be reinforced to meet the demands of the next century), that expansion is minor compared to the increase in the number of residents living in not-so-dense areas. It is true that the interconnections between cities in the Northeast have led to strong intercity rail ridership compared to the rest of the country, but the true success, especially of the New York metropolitan area, has been in maintaining urban and commuter rail ridership, which represents a far larger quantity of users and which has nothing at all to do with the presence of the greater Boston-Washington megaregion. The megaregion in itself, in other words, cannot be directly correlated with the notions of higher density…

Without a comprehensive change in the way the entire transportation apparatus is funded in the U.S., high-speed rail will result in few of the “spatial fixes” Florida highlights as his future goal. Indeed, there is no immediate connection between intercity rail use and giving up private cars; I have argued before that fast trains do not automatically mean an increase in public transportation use to and from stations, in the same way as different airports have different percentages of commuters using cars to get to them depending on the travel offerings available.

While there will be increasing dense development around stops, the fact of the matter is that fast train systems by definition have few stations, certainly not enough to encourage the brunt of overall nationwide development, even if implemented at a vast scale. That’s because, unlike the auto and single-family home model of the previous century, high-speed rail assumes dense, walkable development that falls off after a mile at most. One high-speed rail line cannot produce the same amount of geographic development as one highway.

Yet most problematic about Florida’s argument is his inability to identify improved fixed-route urban transit as the more efficient promoter of the anti-sprawl. While they are not as sexy as fast trains, rapid transit in the form of buses, subways, and light rail more directly allows for the creation of dense urban zones that do challenge the hegemony of the automobile and single-family home. If Florida’s intention were to do the most with a limited amount of funds to increase the number of livable, walkable neighborhoods, for instance, he would do best by encouraging the construction of these inner-city lines, combined with a focus on dense construction around their stations. From that perspective, high-speed rail is of secondary importance.

I’m in general agreement with the main thrust of Freemark’s argument. The point I am making about mega-regions today and spatial fixes is that to work they must simultaneously expand and intensify the use of space. Mega-regions and high-speed rail help bring about the expanded development corridor. Freemark is right, though we need much more and much better inner-city and intra-metro transit in the firm of, as he says, buses, subways, and light rail to create denser urban and suburban zones that intensify our use of space. And I would add more flexible living and working arrangements so folks can live closer to where they work, and walk and bike more. All of these changes go together to produce a new spatial fix which can undergird prosperity and lead to a better, more sustainable way of life.

Update: Had a nice e-mail back and forth earlier with Freemark. Robert Cruickshank weighs in here.