A Very Scientific Analysis of the Milwaukee Bucks New Ticket Promotion

10 Wins. Guaranteed. Get your pass at https://t.co/kW6Edr8us2 pic.twitter.com/pFCfYTOSQj
— Milwaukee Bucks (@Bucks) December 27, 2016

TODAY, in Sports Business news, the Milwaukee Bucks, The Holy Blessed Team of Giannis, announced an exciting new ticket package:

One Hundred and Forty-Nine buxxx will get YOU, the Milwaukee Consumer, attendance to AS MANY GAMES AS NECESSARY to be in Attendance at TEN BUCKS VICTORIES. A cursory examination suggests that the Bucks, who have the most exciting young player in the league and a whole thing that is sort of slowly coming together, are doing this to get fans to download their mobile app, which is required to cash in on this sweet sunshine deal. What a deal! WHAT. A. DEAL. VICE Sports Rates this deal a 69/69.

But how good can it get? Because, people, we're dealing with a real cost benefit analysis problem here. Fact: If you buy this and the Bucks win all ten games, you only got ten games out of this deal.* Obviously not ideal. But, then again, there's a chance that Giannis gets injured, or the team just sort of organically falls apart, and you could find yourself hauling your sad midwestern body to, like, 25 mediocre games, cursing the day your face lit up and you dropped your hard-earned 149 Big Ones on the Ticket Package that Has Become your Albatross, dragging you deep into an ocean of unending malaise. ("Albatross" is another word for "anchor," right?)

Thankfully for you, though, I took an AP Econ class in high school and am more than equipped to calculate the ideal number of games you can milk out of this package. You just have to figure out the precise amount of pleasure you receive from attending a win versus the precise amount of pleasure from attending a loss.

Now, I might not be a fancy DATA JOURNALIST but but I AM a public figure with 1000-plus Twitter followers, not to brag, and I think that's a pretty good sample size. So, I crowdsourced:

TWITTER QUESTION FOR ARTICLE I AM WORKING ON: How much enjoyment, on a scale of 1-100, do you get from attending a home loss vs. a home win?
— Corbina Smith (@corbinasmith) December 27, 2016

I got nine serious responses, added them up and calculated what economists call "The Mean" of those responses with some very arcane, complicated math that you probably don't properly understand. What I discovered was amazing: ten sports fans who follow me and are looking at Twitter at about 11:00-1:30 in the afternoon, Pacific Time, representing a BROAD cross section of all sports fans, which Milwaukee Bucks fans, I think it can be safely stated, are safely nestled into, attribute a PleasureScore of 45.999 to attending a loss and 86.111 to attending a win, with 50 being a purely neutral state of pleasure.

At this point, it gets a little complicated. If we assume that the value of "0" is a neutral state, a sort of perfect feeling of neither pleasure nor pain (some Buddhists might argue that this represents true enlightenment; I would like to engage with them on this matter but I am afraid this broader philosophical concern has to be cast to the wayside, here.); that "-1" is true madness, death, and suffering, the moment of one's being stabbed played out over a nightmarish hour with no upside to be discovered at the end of the tunnel; and "1" is perfect bliss, the moment of orgasm played out over a wondrous hour that ends only when you are given a large fudge cake, we can take these PleasureScores, subtract the pure neutrality figure of 50 from them, and apply them to a model that will precisely measure how long it will take for this ticket package to become a terrible burden:

As you can see, the misery of losing will start to marginally diminish the experience at the moment of the Bucks' first loss. But the amount of total pleasure derived from the experience will still ride high for a while, for the average sports fan, at least. Attending nearly all of the Bucks' remaining home games will remain enjoyable throughout the year …

… but, woe to whichever Bucks fan is cursed with this "deal" if it manages to stretch out into next season! Truly, the grind of watching the team trash it up, night after night, will begin to drag on their spirits. And don't even speak to me about a Bucks teams whose woes stretch out into the expanse of forever:

Because after a mere 4.1 years of Bucks futility, the constitution of even the HEARTIEST of fans will become broken and withered. Once optimistic fans purchasing a ticket on an app, now devastated and broken husks, hauling themselves into cars and busses and trains, their very concept of pleasure warped and broken by the continuing futility of a Bucks team with no direction, but still forced to keep attending games until they are gifted that elusive tenth win the package promised them when they plunked down 150 bones. These sad creatures live off dried up arena popcorn they have stored in their seat from previous losses. It is brutality and madness. They smell like rotting cabbage and their eyes are just small black circles floating in a sea of red.

And so, faithful audience: before you buy this ticket, ask yourself this. How much losing can I, personally, take in the pursuit of ten wins? Will even one loss render this whole experience disappointing, or can I derive enough pleasure from the process of winning that I will not become trapped in a Years Long Fun House of Nightmares? The model speaks for itself, but only you can decide for you and your family.

*This is a white lie. There are bonus games tacked on for five and ten game win streaks, I suspect to head off the level of nihilism I am promoting, here. Still, you can't just let a silly thing like "nominal facts" get in the way of a good model.