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.

Map courtesy of the Martin Prosperity Institute

Corporate headquarters are both heavily concentrated in and very specialized by region, according to a new  analysis by Scott Pennington of the Martin Prosperity Institute.

Eighty-five percent of the headquarters of the largest companies in the U.S. and Canada are concentrated in a dozen or so mega-regions.

Two mega-regions – Chi-Pitts and Char-Lanta – account for almost half of all manufacturing headquarters. Chicago appears to have increased its hold on manufacturing headquarters, in effect pulling them in from other major cities in the mega-region.Not surprisingly, Hou-Orleans dominates in energy; and Nor-Cal is the center for high-tech headquarters.

Finance and insurance are more dispersed. While Bos-Wash accounts for 17 percent of finance and insurance headquarters, Char-Lanta and Tor-Buff-Chester also have significant clusters. These regions are also more diverse in the economic makeup – with significant concentrations of media and entertainment in Bos-Wash and Tor-Buff-Chester and of manufactuirng in Char-lanta – perhaps making their more resileint in coping with the fallout from the financial crisis.

The Obama administration recently pledged $8 billion for high-speed rail. While just a fraction of the overall stimulus package and just a drop-in-the-bucket of what is needed to build a real national high-speed rail network, the funds generated considerable hub-bub and, for some, outright jubilation among regionalists, environmentalists, energy efficiency advocates, and those who have long fought for improved U.S. rail transit. It also has encouraged a mad political scramble for funds as regions position for federal monies. In Canada, there is a mounting drumbeat for high-speed rail connecting Windsor, Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, and Quebec cities and also for connecting Vancouver to Seattle.

For starters, here’s a map of proposed U.S. high speed rail projects:

It’s clear that the U.S. and North America lag far behind countries like Japan with its Shinkansen or France with the TGV on high-speed rail connectivity.

But how to base decisions on what routes get funded? How to avoid a purely political outcome and create a framework for investing in high-speed rail that makes the most economic sense?

Here’s a map of North America’s mega-regions:

The largest of North America’s mega-regions is the great “Bos-Wash” mega-region initially identified by the geographer Jean Gottman. It stretches down the east coast corridor encompassing the east coast cities of Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C., and is home to more than 50 million people and produces more than $2.2 trillion in economic activity. Its economic output is greater than that of the UK and France and more than double that of India or Canada. The second biggest, which Gottman dubbed “Chi-Pitts,” covers more than 100,000 square miles and is home to 46 million people, producing $1.6 trillion in economic output. Taken together, America’s mega-regions produce more than three-quarters of its economic output and the lion’s share of its innovations (see the table below):

In the main, the proposed routes map pretty well to U.S. mega-regions. Given the fact that megas are dense and interconnected centers of population and economic activity, it makes sense to develop high-speed rail connections within mega-regions first, and later develop connections between contiguous ones, say for example down the east and west coasts or across the Great Lakes region.

The table below, compiled by Patrick Adler at the Martin Prosperity Institute, shows the distance between key cities and then compares the driving times (calculated on Google) to current top high-speed rail speeds (from Transportation Quarterly):

Philadelphia becomes a veritable suburb of NY, its commute time shrinking from nearly two hours to slightly more than a half hour. Washington-NYC and Boston-NYC become hour-and-a-half trips. San Diego becomes a bedroom suburb of Los Angeles. And commute times shrink considerably across Cascadias’ main cities: The time to get from Portland to Seattle shrinks to just over an hour, while travel between Seattle and Vancouver is reduced to less than an hour. It would take just slightly longer than an hour and a half to get from Charlotte to Atlanta. And commutes between Dallas and Houston and Dallas and Austin shrink to an hour and a half or less.

Better high-speed rail connections promise considerable economic efficiency gains. And they also promise to relieve the psychological burdens of commuting by car. Research by behavioral economists like Nobel prize-winner Daniel Kahneman finds that long car commutes are among the things that most adversely affect our happiness.

But there is an even bigger and more fundamental reason to connect our mega-regions through high-speed rail. As I recently argued in The Atlantic, our current economic crisis promises to powerfully reshape America’s geography. There will be winners and losers, and a new economic geography will emerge in time.

Geographic expansion, as I noted there, is a fundamental axis of economic recovery and development. Recovery after the Long Depression of the 1870s was in part powered by the rise of the large-scale industrial city that grew up around raw materials, ports, and railroads, expanding outward along its early street-car lines. While many see the rise of Keynesian spending (particularly World War II spending) as key to U.S. recovery from the Great Depression of the 1930s, post-war recovery was propelled by the rise of another era of geographic expansion - the rise of the Sunbelt and the massive growth of auto-oriented suburbia. Demand for cars surged to move workers between home and work. And suburban houses all had to be filled with the refrigerators, washing machines, dryers, television sets, and consumer appliances rolling off America’s assembly lines. This post-war auto-oriented “fordist” development model worked to ensure that mass production and mass consumption could grow together fueling the expansion of America’s great golden era.

But fordism has come smack up against its limits. It’s cheaper to produce many industrial goods off-shore, and the geography of post-war suburbia stretched to its breaking point. It may well be impossible for sustained recovery to come from breathing life back into the banks, auto companies, and suburban-oriented development model. A new period of geographic expansion – or what geographers term a “new spatial fix” – may well be needed to spur a renewed era of economic growth and development.

The history of capitalist development is the history of the more expansive and intensive use of space. Post-war suburbs, the rise of larger metropolitan areas, the development of multi-nodal regions with edge cities as well as downtown cores are part and parcel of this process of geographic development. It’s a mistake to consider suburban sprawl a backward step (as some do), and to see only more compact urban style back-to-the-city development as a path to the future. The rise of the mega-region is the cornerstone of a new, more intensive and more expansive use of space.

New periods of geographic expansion require new systems of infrastructure. Ever since the days of the canals, the early railroad, and streetcar suburbs, we’ve seen how infrastructure and transportation systems work to spur new patterns economic and regional development. The streetcar expanded the boundaries of the late 19th and early 20th century city, while the railroad moved goods and people between them. The automobile enabled workers to move to the suburbs and undertake far greater commutes, expanding the geographic landscape still further.

Mega-regions, if they are to function as integrated economic units, require better, more effective, and faster ways move goods, people, and ideas. High-speed rail accomplishes that, and it also provides a framework for future in-fill development along its corridors. Just as development filled in along the early street-car lines and the post-war highways, high-speed rail will encourage denser, more compact, and concentrated development with growth filling in along its routes over time. Spain’s new high-speed rail link between Barcelona and Madrid not only massively reduced commuting times between these two great Spanish cities, according to a recent New York Times report, it has also helped revitalize several declining locations along the line.

It’s time to start thinking of our transit and infrastructure projects less in political terms and more as a set of strategic investments that are fundamental to the speed and scope of our economic recovery and to the emerging shape of the economy, society, and communities of the future.