On Tuesday, The Athletic released an anonymous player survey asking a multitude of questions ranging from things like who the best defender in the league was to who is the most overrated player.
Two of the questions that were included in the survey were, “hat arena has the best fans?” And, “hat arena has the worst fans?” Here are what the results ended up being.
The good news here is that the Smoothie King Center (home of our New Orleans Pelicans) was not one of the top-10 finishers in the arena with the worst fans category (a sample size of 99 votes).
The top-10 arenas were as follows: the Charlotte Hornets’ Spectrum Center, Detroit Pistons’ Little Caesars Arena, Washington Wizards’ Capital One Arena, Utah Jazz’s Vivint Arena, Boston Celtics’ TD Garden, Houston Rockets’ Toyota Center, Philadelphia 76ers’ Wells Fargo Center, Orlando Magic’s Amway Center, San Antonio Spurs’ AT&T Center, and Los Angeles Clippers’ Crypto.com Arena.
However, the bad news is that the Smoothie King Center also was not one of the top-10 finishers in the arena with the best fans category (a 103-vote sample size).
The top-10 arenas with the best fans were as follows: Boston Celtics’ TD Garden, Sacramento Kings’ Golden 1 Center, Golden State Warriors’ Chase Center, New York Knicks’ Madison Square Garden, Philadelphia 76ers’ Wells Fargo Center, Oklahoma City Thunder’s Paycom Center, Utah Jazz’s Vivint Arena, Toronto Raptors’ Scotiabank Arena, Cleveland Cavaliers’ Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse, and Chicago Bulls’ United Center.
(Sidebar: You can tell that there are some really polarizing viewpoints when it comes to certain stadiums. For instance, the stadiums of the Celtics, 76ers, and Jazz show up in the top-10 of both these categories.)
Interestingly enough, if you go into the article on The Athletic, you can see which teams are included in the “Other” group in both those categories, and in neither area is the Smoothie King Center listed. That means that they didn’t receive any votes (at all) in either one of these questions.
So there you have it. According to the players, the Smoothie King Center has neither the best fans, nor the worst ones.