Popularity of NBA up to fans to interpret
The NBA is in a heap of trouble, or it’s doing just fine. Whichever version of reality you choose, you can be sure of it.
This goes for the explanations, too. If you believe the league is hemorrhaging fans, there is no doubt those people are leaving because they hate the thing that you dislike about modern basketball.
If you say the NBA is alienating the public because of too many dynasties, or not enough of them, or because players talk too much about the world they live in, or not enough about China, or because cable TV is a relic of the past and nobody watches full games anymore, nobody is going to prove you wrong.
See, the great thing about the NBA is it perfectly encapsulates everything you’ve been trying to tell people about what is wrong with the world today, or about what is right with it. And this isn’t just your opinion. The NBA gives you data to support it.
For instance, did you know that the average viewership of games on ABC has plummeted from 5.42 million in the 2011-12 season to 2.95 million this season? This is obvious proof, as a report in The Athletic this week posited, that the public is getting sick and tired of being lectured about racism and politics by the likes of Spurs coach Gregg Popovich.
But see, the beauty of this is that if you are sure that Popovich’s embrace of social justice causes is not only noble, but also attracting as many fans as it is alienating, the numbers work in your favor, too. Back in late February, just before the NBA’S pandemic-induced hiatus, Sports Business Daily released figures for teams’ local TV ratings. Nearing the end of their worst regular season in 23 years, Popovich’s Spurs ranked …
First in the league, of course. Nobody likes being wrong, and the beauty of this subject is that you never have to be. If you maintain the NBA is on the road to ruin, all you have to do is cite statistics showing its national TV ratings have fallen during the past decade while NFL ratings have more or less stayed the same.
If your hypothesis is the ratings slide is actually due to cord-cutting and viewership habits, and that the league is more popular than ever, just point people to the chart showing the NBA reported $8.76 billion in revenue in 2018-19, compared to $3.68 billion in 2011-12.
What really gets people fired up is a discussion about how all
of the games during the NBA’S bubble restart have been played with socialjustice slogans on jerseys and the words “Black Lives Matter” emblazoned on the court. And if you’re here to tell us this stuff has had an effect, you’re definitely on to something.
After all, those messages are surely why ratings for the seeding games were lower than in the regular season (although you’re also correct if you say they were down because many of the games were played on weekday afternoons, or because people didn’t like the absence of the crowd, or because only a couple of playoff spots were up for grabs).
Also, the “Black Lives Matter” logo explains why the daytime ratings for this week’s playoffs have been down since last season. It also explains why viewership of the late games on both Monday and Tuesday increased by more than 25 percent from the same spots last postseason.
Fans have had enough of mixing politics with sports, which is why the NBA finished eighth and sixth in total cable viewers on Monday and Tuesday night, trailing Democratic convention coverage by CNN, Fox and MSNBC. But fans also cannot get enough of sports stars speaking their political conscience, which is why the NBA dominated all cable networks in the advertiser-coveted 18to-49-year-old demographic on both nights.
Sure, you could try to take a nuanced view of all of this, and admit that there might not be any obvious answers or overriding trends, but what is the point in that? Why would anyone want to concede there might be more than one reason why a sports league might be losing viewers? Or open themselves up to the idea there might be more than one metric for gauging a league’s popularity? Or consider the delicate and often contradictory pushand-pull between catering hardcore aficionados of a sport and luring casual fans who never were that into it anyway? Or acknowledge that not every decision on what to do or say should be about the bottom line?
It’s more fun to be right. And when it comes to the NBA, you have all the proof you need.