Celtics Fans Have Better Grammar Than Cavs, Heat Fans

Photo by Alex Kehr on Flickr/Creative Commons

The Celtics are due for resurgence this year. The team’s fans, on the other hand, are overdue for an English lesson.

Automated proofreading service Grammarly set out to find which NBA franchises have the most tenuous grasp on the English language. It found that Celtics fans have the 19th ranked grammar in the league, making nearly five mistakes per 100 words in online comments. The most common words used by Celtics fans from August to October? “Lee,” “Sully,” “Celtics,” “Bradley,” and “Rondo.”

Celtics fans rank ahead of fans of the Cleveland Cavaliers (21) and Miami Heat (22). The best grammar in the league belong to Minnesota Timberwolves fans, while New York Knicks fans had the most diverse vocabularies, using 25 unique words per 100. Utah Jazz fans had the worst grammar. Among their most frequently used words were two spellings of point guard Trey Burke’s last name and the word “average.”

Fans in the Eastern Conference, meanwhile, make roughly just as many errors as those in the Western Conference.

Breaking from past versions of its grammar for other sports’ fanbases, which determined that Red Sox fans have better grammar than Yankees fans and that Patriots fans have some of the worst in the NFL, Grammarly collected the first five comments left on each team’s SBNation blog, rather than those left on each team’s official website, until it had amassed 100, each at least 50 words in length.

“For the purposes of this study, we counted only black-and-white mistakes such as misspellings, wrong and missing punctuation, misused or missing words, and subject-verb disagreement,” Grammarly said in a release. “We ignored stylistic variations such as the use of common slang words, team nicknames, serial comma usage, and the use of numerals instead of spelled-out numbers.”

You can check out Grammarly’s full ranking below.

Infographic courtesy of Grammarly