The Decline of Team Rivalries in Professional Sports

Player mobility, personal branding, and the erosion of the animosity between professional franchises

The NBA has had a busy off-season announcing some tweaks to their game in an effort to make the regular season more interesting. There have been the typical rule changes (this year with a target on eliminating flopping) and the introduction of the new in-season tournament to keep fans engaged when the collective sports consciousness of America is locked into the NFL. Another wrinkle that has been unveiled this week is the introduction of NBA Rivals Week, a slate of games with what the NBA calls “classic and budding rivalries”.

The interesting aspect of Rivals Week is that it features matchups such as the Brooklyn Nets vs Philadelphia 76ers, Memphis Grizzlies vs Minnesota Timberwolves, and Portland Trail Blazers vs San Antonio Spurs. While these matchups are interesting for a myriad of reasons (Scoot Henderson vs Victor Wembanyama has a ton of intrigue for people that followed the draft this past year for instance), they aren’t exactly teeming with animosity between fan bases that one associates with the term rivalry. While some could look at Rivals Week matchups as a loose definition of the term rivals, it raises a different question. Have rivalries in pro sports started to diminish in the modern era?