NBA Team Instagram Engagement Analysis

Introduction

The New York Knicks beat the Los Angeles Lakers on Instagram. Not in followers. The Lakers have roughly ten times more of those. The Knicks win the one metric that actually matters: engagement. That single fact is the whole story of NBA social media. It is the lesson every brand keeps getting wrong.

This is the analysis with the real numbers, engagement rates, likes and comments per post, set against the follower counts, so you can see exactly why the biggest account is not the most valuable one.

Followers are not engagement

Follower count measures how many people once clicked follow. Engagement rate measures how many actually like, comment and care right now. They are not the same thing. And on a platform where algorithms increasingly serve content based on interest rather than who you follow, the gap matters more every year.

A massive following built over a decade is full of passive and inactive accounts. That is why a smaller, fiercely active fanbase can out-engage a giant one. A huge audience can even turn into a liability if those people do not interact. For NBA teams, as for any brand choosing who to partner with, engagement rate is the truer signal of influence.

Engagement rate, ranked

The top NBA teams by Instagram engagement rate, with average likes and comments per post. Figures are from a Fadeaway World study using the Phlanx engagement calculator, so they shift over time.

Source: Fadeaway World analysis via the Phlanx engagement rate calculator. Follower data sourced from Instagram. Figures are from the study period and change over time.

Followers, for contrast

Now the follower leaderboard, a completely different order. This is the league's reach. It shows exactly why reach alone misleads.

Sources: Captiv8, LWOSports, STN Digital / Sportico. Follower counts are recent reported figures and change over time.

What the numbers reveal

Put the two tables side by side and three things jump out.

• The Knicks punch far above their weight. They top the engagement table despite not even leading the follower table, proof that a passionate, active fanbase beats a bigger passive one. Their fans show up regardless of on-court results.
• The Warriors win reach, not the engagement crown. Around 32.4 million Instagram followers, the most in the NBA and more than the most-followed NFL team, yet raw size does not translate to the highest engagement rate.
• The Lakers are the volume kings. Their raw likes and comments per post, roughly 249,802 likes and 1,056 comments, dwarf everyone because of sheer audience size, yet their engagement rate still trails the Knicks. Big absolute numbers, lower efficiency.

Note too that different studies crown different leaders depending on method and timeframe, with league-wide 2025 analysis also highlighting the Memphis Grizzlies for strong NBA Instagram engagement. The exact ranking moves, the principle does not.

Why engagement equals money

Here is where engagement stops being a vanity stat and turns into dollars. The metric brands use is earned media value, the money a brand would expect to generate from a post. It tracks engagement rather than followers.

That is the whole argument in one example. Two accounts with identical follower counts can be worth wildly different amounts to a brand. The difference is engagement. A team or creator whose audience actively interacts delivers far more value per post than one with a large but quiet following.

The brand takeaway

The NBA on Instagram is a clean, public lesson in a mistake brands make every day: judging a partner by follower count. The fixes are simple.

• Lead with engagement rate, not followers. The Knicks-over-Lakers result is the entire case. A smaller, active audience often beats a bigger passive one.
• Use earned media value to price a deal. EMV ties a partnership to likely return. It favours engagement over raw reach.
• Expect rate to fall as size rises. Mega-accounts naturally sit near or below the 1.2% benchmark, so judge them against peers of similar size, not against micro-accounts.
• Verify the audience is real. Engagement is the metric most worth faking, so confirm it is genuine before you commit budget.

How to use this with Flinque

The NBA makes the point at the scale of billion-dollar franchises, yet it applies to every partnership decision you will ever make: the account with the most followers is rarely the best value. The one with the most genuine engagement usually is.

With Flinque you can benchmark a creator or account's engagement against category norms, run a fake follower check to confirm the audience is real, then verify reach before you partner, so you choose on the metric that actually predicts results. The Knicks beat the Lakers on engagement. Flinque helps you find your equivalent of the Knicks.