Earlier this month, discussing an NBA Finals contested by two of the league’s smallest markets, Commissioner Adam Silver dropped a bizarre yet beguiling statistic: About 300 million Americans, or 88 percent of the populace, live in cities smaller than Oklahoma City and Indianapolis.

Is that true? Do almost 9 in 10 Americans live in small or midsize towns?

Yes! But more importantly, no!

We quickly found that it’s technically correct — within a few percentage points — that almost 90 percent of us live in cities smaller than Oklahoma City or Indianapolis, a stat that Silver got from a social media post by Oklahoma City Mayor David Holt.

But a few minutes of additional mapping and measuring show us that number’s not what it seems to be. We bet you’ve already guessed why, but the key word is “cities.”

The mayor based his stat on each city’s population. But we doubt NBA fandom ends at the city limits — if it did, the Los Angeles Clippers would have become the smallest-market team in the league when they opened their new arena in Inglewood, California.

In fact, strict city-level measurements like those aren’t usually the best choice. East Carolina University professor Steven Richter, who has built a career out of crunching numbers on the size and shape of cities, was kind enough to explain why.

“If you look at [a city] from space, you just see a giant island of concrete,” Richter told us. “And the city boundaries have little to do with the size and shape of that island.”

The outline of any given city ends up being determined by accidents of history and local annexation law as much as by any geographic or demographic imperative. To prove it, Richter dared us to look at almost any population-density map and guess where the city limits were drawn.

There often little rhyme or reason to what’s in a given city and what isn’t, which makes them tough to compare on a Big Apples-to-oranges basis. Historian Becky Nicolaides, author of “The New Suburbia,” pointed out that most of the San Fernando Valley, famously described as America’s Suburb, is technically part of the city of Los Angeles, while some of our densest urban jungles belong to enclaves or inner-ring suburbs.

She added that no suburb or city should really be considered on its own. Larger cities have evolved into complex regional economies where, in some cases, you’d even be hard-pressed to define a single hub.

“There’s been a dispersal of jobs and industry and economic activity out into the periphery,” she told us. “There’s so much interconnectedness. … That’s been the case for a long time.”

Any serious analysis of this type will account for that, typically by using something like a metropolitan statistical area, a geography defined by the White House Office of Management and Budget. It clumps counties together based on how many of their workers commute across county lines, which gets us a fairly organic — if blunt — measure of interconnected urban regions.

To be sure, as Holt reminded us in an email, the city definition us nerds consider too narrow for our purposes “is literally the entire work of municipal governance in the United States.” In defense of what he called “the very nature of governance and the definition of place in America,” he took issue with our offhanded dismissal of the administrative structure to which he has dedicated seven years of his life — and counting. He’ll be up for a third four-year term in early 2026, and his brand of anti-Trump Republicanism seems to be working for him. (The NBA didn’t reply to a request for comment.)

And he (and Nicolaides, who made a similarly passionate point) are correct. Cities play a pivotal role in our everyday existence. But so do sewer and mosquito abatement districts, and you don’t see anyone suggesting we use those as boundaries for population analyses.

Consider that, when you look at how many people live within city limits, Indianapolis and Oklahoma City are surprisingly large, ranking as the 16th and 20th biggest cities in the country. But that’s a quirk of measurement. If you include entire metro areas, denser cities with more suburbs jump in the rankings while Indy and OKC plunge to 34th and 43rd largest, respectively.

In his comparison, then, Silver just happened to use a metric that disproportionately favors Indy and OKC, two of the most expansionist cities in U.S. history.

Oklahoma’s land-hungry capital is notorious for having some of the broadest city limits in the world. Its annexation binge began in 1959 at the behest of city godfather Stanley Draper, the Robert Moses of the Plains, as chronicled by Sam Anderson in his mind-altering book “Boom Town.”

“The biggest threat to OKC’s future, Draper believed, was the suburbs. If the settlements ringing the city were allowed to become legitimate cities themselves — to grow and declare independence-OKC would quickly find itself hemmed in. Draper liked to point to Pittsburgh: a great city squeezed into fifty-five square miles, wrapped in a straitjacket of suburbs. All of those outsiders flooded in, every day, to enjoy the benefits of the downtown, draining its resources and tearing up its infrastructure-and then they went home to the suburbs, contributing nothing.

“Draper saw one sure way to circumvent this problem: to claim as much land as possible for Oklahoma City. Land meant control. And land was one resource that Oklahoma still had in abundance.”

A few states away and less than a decade later, as White flight emptied Indianapolis, Republicans swept into power across the state and moved to arrest the exodus by simply swallowing the suburbs.

Their scheme to merge the city and surrounding Marion County into what is still known as the “unigov,” led by rookie mayor Richard Lugar, grew the city’s land area by more than 50 percent overnight. It broadened its tax base and, according to Maxwell Hackman, soon to be the chief librarian at Medgar Evers College, allowed Indianapolis to invest in facilities that would host the Colts and Pacers.

So, those two cities are exceptional. In the typical large U.S. metro area, about a quarter of the population lives in the largest city. In OKC and Indy, it’s closer to half.

If you run Silver and Holt’s calculation again, using metro areas, you find only 157 million Americans (47 percent) live in metro areas smaller than Oklahoma City. In other words, most of us (53 percent!) live in metros large enough to host this NBA Finals.

These definitions aren’t perfect, but they give us something to keep in mind when you hear cities contrasted with an ill-defined notion of the real America.

All told, about 31 percent of Americans live in primary cities, 55 percent live in those cities’ suburbs, and just 13 percent live in rural areas (1 percent fell victim to rounding; may they rest in peace).