The story takes place in Britain and the vast majority of the characters barely, if at all, know what Football(aka Soccer) is. Mr. Weasley the muggle "expert" doesn't know what a rubber duck is for. They're not gonna know shit about some American muggle sport.
The fact that the wizarding world is able to be this aloof about 99% of the population they live amongst is incredible. In a real world that would be due to a tireless cadre of extremely knowledgable and capable wizards working to keep them separate. Unfortunately the fact that some hack like Voldie could make such a mess of things so easily kinda disproves that. Therefore the wizarding world is the luckiest bunch of idiots ever.
You should read Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. I don't want to spoil anything but it is so good. Honestly, book stores should stop selling the official Harry Potter books and just stock HPMOR.
I actually did forever ago. It was pretty good. Harry is too smart and way too smug for me but I did really like voldie's plan and how they dealt with him. I wonder if that would work in the actual books. It kinda seems like it from book 2.
To be fair, I think most people would be insufferably smug if they could blow everyone's minds with some basic physics and creative thinking.
Muggle: this is a standard Blu-ray optical disc. It is capable of storing up to 100gb of information, which [according to Google] roughly translates into one or more movies (depending on the video quality), 28,000 songs, 30,000 photos, or 67.8 million pages of text.
Wizard: all of that in this tiny disc!? What is this? Magic?
Muggle: nah bitch, that's physics.
Wizard: gasp physics! What a strange name for muggle-magic.
Second the recommendation for HPMOR. It does so much more service to the Wizarding World setting than JK Rowling ever did. It is outright one of my favorite pieces of literature just on its own merits.
No that's pretty much it, there's even a subplot where Muggle Studies is an elective at Hogwarts, but only Hermonie wants to take it.... and it's solely so she can dunk on Wizards not knowing shit about Muggles while getting an Easy A
This is why I only liked the earlier Harry Potter books, the setting is clearly just not built to be taken seriously... so Goblet of Fire and onward demanding as such just fails.
You hit the nail on the head. It's sort of like Doctor Who in the sense that it asks of you, "don't look at any of this stuff too closely, just enjoy the ride." Unfortunately for Harry Potter the structure of the story eventually required a bit more seriousness and the world can't provide it very well.
And the Chicago Bulls are a basketball team... so there's no chance they'd know what that is, despite Quidditch being essentially soccer + basketball...
Side note, i really hate the whole soccer/football thing. It's so confusing because sometimes people accommodate me and mean American football but just say football. But then I have to ask what they mean anyway because not everyone accommodates me that way (and why should they?). It's just so many extra steps.