I sometimes browse the HF board forums, a hockey message board. I note a lot of posters really love to slam basketball. Why? And more importantly, what sports tend to be followed by the same people? And which rarely overlap? For example, would tennis fans tend to follow golf or do Formula One and NASCAR fans get along?
I am a huge Formula One fan, really love World Rally (even if I don’t get to watch it anymore) but could not care less for Indy cars or Nascar.
I watch all the classes of MotoGP, but no other series.
I love college football don’t watch the pros at all.
I think part of the hate for basketball from hockey fans comes from the fact that the two leagues compete for air-time and media attention since they play at the same time. The pro sports year has summertime baseball followed by a fall and winter dominated by NFL, then a brief break for NCAA basketball, then finally NBA and NHL have to compete for attention from the networks and sportswriters in late spring. The NBA wins this battle at least in American markets.
I’d say that here in the US, there’s probably a decent soccer / Formula One overlap, not because they’re chocolate & peanut butter, but because they’re both primarily foreign sports, and people from overseas are more interested in them.
Otherwise, I’d think that Football tends to overlap with all the others well- just because it seems to cross the boundaries that other sports have- it gets the urban crowd, the contact sports crowd, and the college educated crowd about equally well.
Being from Philly, I know this is true for a small, but very vocal portion of the Flyers fanbase that harbors a great deal of resentment towards the 76ers. Of course, there are other factors involved (race sadly being one for some folks), but I would say the NBA being more popular than the NHL on a national level is the main reason.
Personally, I’m a huge fan of all Philly teams and have always been baffled by that attitude, especially since the Flyers tend to be more popular on a local level anyway. There was one day last spring when the Flyers and Sixers both had playoff games. I was out shopping earlier in the day and happened to be wearing a Sixers shirt. Wouldn’t you know, someone noticed and actually gave me a hard time because I wasn’t wearing a Flyers shirt instead. I gave my standard response that I never knew there was a law against liking both teams and that the last time I checked, they played different sports and not against each other.
NASCAR and wrasslin’.
The sports rivalry between New York and Boston team fans is legendary.
Hockey and basketball cultures are almost polar opposites. Hockey has more of a blue-collar simplicity to it, and basketball’s 100+ point scores can seem outrageously silly to diehard hockey fans in comparison. Basketball also has a culture of highly paid star players, which hockey fans would see as showboating and having the lunatics run the asylum. (Hockey players are expected to keep a more humble profile and have historically made less money, which is exactly what many diehard fans like about it)
I can’t watch basketball. I put watching basketball on about the same level as listening to golf on the radio. For that matter, I can’t watch golf on the TV. My favorite sport to watch is NASCAR followed closely by baseball.
I can watch football, only because the games are hyped so much and there is so much time for the color commentators to add their personal stories.
Hockey is not made to be seen on TV. I love to go to the games, but forget about it if I can’t go see a game during the season. Same for indoor soccer.
I don’t really follow wrestling unless I hear that one of the greats from years past will be on the show. Who could pass a chance to see Rick Flair again.
I think, for the most part, people follow the sports they have some familiarity with.
SFC Schwartz
Real baseball and the American League.
Love 'rasslin and Formula 1, can’t stand NASCAR.
I feel like European soccer and MLB go together well - the seasons nicely complement without much overlap. They both have a somewhat leisurely pace to the action, and some subtlety. The only real disconnect for me is that baseball is so tied up with statistical analysis and soccer has almost none of value, from what I can find.
Anyone who saw him wrestle during the past 15 years? 
That’s not a joke. He’s embarassing himself. I know he needs the money, but it’s just painful to look at him now.
I’ll second this, as someone who enjoys watching hockey and fairly actively dislikes basketball. If you were to ask me why I disliked basketball, I would cite immediately to the “star culture” that gives us things like LeBron’s “The Decision” and too damned much scoring. Seriously, who cares about whether you get a basket? It’s one of about forty or fifty you’ll get in the course of the game.
Hockey and soccer go together well. Similar, extremely basic gameplay, similar low scores, similar weird off-sides rules. One winter, one summer. It’s just an easy transition from one to the other.
I can listen to hockey easily on the radio… haven’t tried with soccer.
Opposite demographics and cultures.
There’s a lot to that. Basketball players are identified early in life and get coddled to an unbelievable degree. Too many of them lose touch with reality. In the pros the game is all about the show. Team play, fundamentals and discipline take a back seat to the show. That’s not the case in hockey. In hockey, enthusiasm is OK but showboating is frowned on and there are ways within the team, the coaches and the opposition that keep it in check (excuse the pun).
If you talk to people that are around pro athletes a lot they will tell you that the hockey players, in general, are the nicest group. Baseball is next, then football, and basketball lags way behind. It has to do at what early age they are told they are great. Most hockey players go through so much shit to make it to the top they have an appreciation of where they came from. Many basketball players were gods when they were in middle school.
The games of basketball and hockey have a lot in common. There is a lot of instant decision making and improvisation. In both sports the degree of athleticism and conditioning is amazing. You won’t find an overweight, slow player in either sport that lasts for very long. It galls hockey fans that basketball athletes can get away with ignoring the fundamentals of the game. Basketball fans, oftentimes don’t understand hockey and don’t care to. There lies the conflict of fandom.
Is this a basketball fan’s perspective, or a hockey fan’s perspective?
I’d go for subjective officiating/rules, pace breaking TV + coach timeouts, free throw shooting being boring, stars getting preferential ref treatment, and players possibly fouling out completely so coaches yank them for long stretches. Some of that is solved with DVR, but still.
My first glib thought to your scoring complaint was that you probably wouldn’t like pre-shot clock basketball where you could have scores of 15-10 either, unless you’re fascinated with the four corners offense. But here are some reasons why it’s good:
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Teams are rewarded for playing well. If scoring is difficult then one team could theoretically be playing better than the other in some abstract way but it doesn’t matter except for aesthetic appreciation.
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If teams can play for an hour and end with a 1-0 score there’s a sense that any score is a fluke.
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Easier scoring allows for runs and momentum. Low scoring games can have this aspect if they have a secondary resource to manage, like American football has field position or a computer RTS has base count and tech tree advancement that can build and then be leveraged at a later time.
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It’s considered more entertaining by most people. AFAIK most NA sports leagues have been trying to make the rules easier for the offense because casual fans enjoy scoring, to the grief of purists. In basketball specifically most people would rather watch two high flying teams put on a show than two slow defensive juggernauts flail against each other.
Now one thing many people say is you only have to watch the 4th quarter of an NBA game, which has a grain of truth to it. Unless a team has a 20+ point lead the other team can still theoretically come back. So what if they changed it to this:
Games will be 9 rounds of 5 minutes each. Each round will start with a score of 0-0, which is then played normally. Whichever side scores the most in a round wins that round. First to 5 rounds wins the game.
This would be good because you could have round winning shots, and early rounds would mean more than what happens in current first quarters. The downside would be game times being too variable. A 5 round sweep would only be 25 minutes, versus one that goes the distance being 45 mins.