National Basketball Association · 2004-052024-25 · 30-Team Era
Near Dacoma, Oklahoma
Epicenter map
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Explore the historical range
Select the championship timescale
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Selected-range context
What shaped this epicenter
Established range
Detailed historical data
Epicenter trail detailsHow the point moved as each season joined the selected range
Trail details appear when the sport lookup loads.
Champions in this rangeSeason, program, historical home location, and recognition basis
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Transparent by design
How Champography calculates the point
Published dataset 1.1 · wgs84-frechet-v1
Every coordinate shown above is calculated offline, validated, and published in a content-hashed static artifact. The browser reads stored results; it does not approximate historical epicenters while you move the slider.
The epicenter
The equal-season-weight geodesic Frechet mean of the selected champion season points, computed on the WGS84 ellipsoid. Each point is the champion's verified home arena for the season they won, not a later arena the franchise moved into.
Season weighting
Every championship season contributes a total weight of exactly 1.0. The NBA has one champion per season, so no season splits its vote.
The BAA seasons
Not applicable: every season from 1946-47 onward produced a single champion. The three BAA championships (1947, 1948, 1949) are counted because the NBA recognizes them as its own.
Historical arenas
The champion's regular-season home arena is used, never a neutral Finals site. Season-specific arena chronology is applied throughout: the 1978-79 SuperSonics point is the Kingdome rather than the Seattle Center Coliseum, the 1977-78 Bullets point is the Capital Centre in Landover rather than Washington itself, and the Pistons' three titles resolve to Auburn Hills rather than Detroit. Where a franchise's Finals home games were displaced (the 1975 Warriors to the Cow Palace, the 2020 Lakers to the Florida bubble), the season's actual home arena is still the point and the displacement is recorded in claim notes.
The champion policy
The single Finals-winning franchise counts for every season. No selector reconciliation is required because the NBA has one official champion per season.
Place labels
Labels prefer the official USGS GNIS Populated Places extract, which includes small and unincorporated communities. If the full national extract is unavailable during a build, a source-controlled GNIS seed is merged with GeoNames cities1000 and the fallback is disclosed in release metadata. GNIS covers the United States only, so a source-controlled Canadian metropolitan table supplies labels for points inside Canadian urban areas; it is a metro-level reference rather than an exhaustive gazetteer, is only consulted within 30 km, and rows resolved against it are marked in the public CSV. Labels remain qualified as 'Near' because populated-place points do not prove legal municipal containment.
Current verified coverage: Champion coverage spans the BAA's founding 1946-47 season through the latest completed season. Franchise relocations are modeled by season: the 1948 Baltimore Bullets are recorded as a defunct franchise unrelated to the modern Washington club, and the 1979 SuperSonics title is credited to the franchise that became the Oklahoma City Thunder while the claim notes record Seattle's retained heritage.
Complete methodologyWeighting, venue policy, locality resolution, precomputation, QA, and limitations.How the math worksWGS84 geodesic mean, range lookup, and trails.Championship erasWhy each preset begins and ends where it does.Search the champions recordInspect every claim, arena, franchise relocation, and source.