If you're an NBA fan who's seen games in person at multiple arenas around the country, you know how widely ticket prices vary by city and team. In New York, you'll pay a whopping $129, on average, for a seat to see the Knicks at Madison Square Garden. By contrast, a ticket to see the New Orleans Pelicans at the Smoothie King Center will set you back by an average of just $30.

Yet incomes, too, vary a lot across NBA markets. In a quest to quantify how affordable NBA games are, we priced the average cost of tickets for a small family — along with the cost of parking, food and beverages — for every team, and compared that to the average household income in the metropolitan center each calls home.

The results, expressed as the average number of work hours to pay for a game, reveal that big-city residents generally work the hardest for their night out. Those fans typically have higher incomes than those in smaller centers, but the stratospheric ticket prices they often pay generally eat up a bigger chunk of their paycheck.

There are exceptions to that pattern, though. For example, on average, fans in Toronto, Philadelphia and Atlanta toil for less time than Oklahomans and Oregonians for their night at the game. And residents of the Washington, D.C., area have the most affordable NBA experience of all, thanks to fairly hefty incomes and a modest average ticket price of $51.