NBA Finals Attract Sharks
US Unprovoked Shark Attacks vs NBA Finals Average TV Viewership
NBA Finals viewership and shark attacks rose together. The overtime buzzer is apparently a dinner bell in the Atlantic. LeBron James has a measurable maritime cost.
“Great whites are drawn to cable box signals during playoff runs. Every dunk echoes underwater.”
— Dr. Reef Rebound, Marine Basketball Scholar
A correlation, not a conclusion
What you are looking at is the trajectory of US Unprovoked Shark Attacks set against NBA Finals Average TV Viewership. Over the years where both series exist, they happen to move in lockstep tightly enough to produce r ≈ 55% (positive). That number sounds impressive. It is also entirely meaningless without a hypothesis.
Two unrelated trends can correlate strongly when they share an underlying driver — economic growth, technology adoption, demographic change — or when the dataset is small enough for noise to look like a signal. The only thing this chart proves is that "correlation does not imply causation" remains the most-ignored sentence in science.
Treat it as a meme with a citation. Source data is from public, reputable datasets; the implied story is not.
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