NBA Ratings continue to be an issue, with numbers either flat or down for the league’s major broadcast partners at TNT and ESPN. The internet is full of pontificating on reasons why, mostly from people who cite their own qualms about the sport and project it onto everyone else as a reason why.
If someone misses the old days of post play, then 3-pointers are the problem. If someone is conservative, then the league’s liberal politics is the problem. If someone has spent money on tickets and missed out on particular players, then resting is the problem.
A lot of people think they have the answer, but there is no one answer as to why the league’s ratings are down right now. There's a lot at play, and I’m not completely sure there's a major issue plaguing the league at all.
Let’s start with this: The ratings system is antiquated. Measuring how many people watch games on TV isn’t the be-all, end-all determining factor in whether the league is popular. Of course, it IS a determining factor in how much money these major networks are willing to shell out for the rights to these games.
The league just signed a monster, $76 billion rights deal for the next 11 years. Everyone knew the ratings trends going into this but outlets were fighting each other for rights this summer. There are ways to measure the consumption of the content beyond the ratings.
Still, something is going on, and I’m not sold on the main issue being the product on the floor.
In April, the NBA announced an All-Time regular season attendance record. If the product on the floor was the problem, then the attendance would match the ratings issues. There's no more 3-point-happy team than the Boston Celtics, but it’s still one of the hottest tickets in the league. There's no correlation between the amount of 3-pointers taken and attendance to support the correlation between the uptick in shooting and fan apathy.
And just as an aside, I don’t understand this fixation on 3-pointers being the problem. The elimination or limiting of those shots just means the long jumpers go from 23 feet, nine inches away to 18-20 feet away. Players always shoot long jumpers. I don’t see why shooting them three to five feet closer is so much more desirable. I don’t think the game would change as materially as people think.
One big issue the league is facing right now is how expensive it is to watch. We just went through an election cycle where a main tipping point was inflation and the cost of living. Everything costs more, from groceries to other material home goods, and necessary services. Americans are shelling out more money, but wages haven't kept pace with inflation.
Meanwhile, various streaming services, including the very popular YouTube TV, have announced price increases. To make matters worse, more popular content is spread over multiple streaming services, and networks continue to stuff their most popular stuff behind a paywall.
Choices are being made. Tack on the expense of the holidays and I think it’s fair to expect some cutback on viewing. You don’t need a streaming service to watch the NFL on Sunday. Every game is shown in its local markets.
The NFL is a juggernaut, but the ESPN+ broadcast of Chargers-Cardinals in late October drew less than two million viewers, so ESPN isn’t immune to even NFL broadcasts struggling on the internet. Internet broadcasts of games aren’t going to have the same impact as over-the-air broadcasts. A recent FrontOfficeSports analysis included this:
“The Commanders and Eagles kick off Week 11 on Thursday night, as prime-time games on Amazon Prime Video are up 7% compared to 2023, averaging 13.08 million viewers. That’s a record for the streamer, which took over Thursday Night Football in 2022, but still down from the 16.2 million viewers that TNF games averaged on linear TV channels during the 2021 season on Fox and the NFL Network.”
The NFL is a major driver of sports viewership and even they are hitting speed bumps along the information superhighway. If people have spent their money chasing NFL broadcasts, then the expense of adding on NBA games through streamers might be a bit much for people who are looking for places to cut back.
That crunch hits younger viewers harder than older ones, generally speaking, because they have less income and therefore need to be more selective. Illegal streams and the explosion of social media have given this demographic options that aren’t measured in simple ratings. They are watching the games in clips, filling in the details on Instagram, TikTok, Reddit, and maybe one of the million podcasts that exist to cover the NBA. Just following the Celtics on social media can give a fan all the relevant details and highlights.
The next generation of viewers is growing up on YouTube Shorts, TikToks and Instagram Reels, all of which are decimating attention spans. Anecdotally, I can tell you that subscribers to my 30-35 minute podcast are consuming about 45% of the show, and that's typical for the industry. Hardly anyone sits through an entire YouTube Short, even if it’s something they're interested in.
The league has an issue reaching these fans and getting them to not only choose to watch an NBA game, but sit through the whole thing. The league wants to find more ways to monetize its social content, but nothing they do in that regard can touch the billions they’ve gotten in TV money. For now, TV is still king. The league has a decade to figure out where to go next. That doesn't change their need to figure out how to keep people interested now.
It doesn’t help that the broadcasting universe around the NBA is based so deeply in overly-hyped hot takes over honest, smart analysis of the sport. NFL broadcasts are full of analysis of plays and schemes. The most popular NBA show, Inside The NBA, is more about personalities than analysis. Shaquille O’Neal regularly trashes the current NBA, telling us more of why it’s not good than celebrating it. Charles Barkley plays a game centered around how little he knows about where players play. Kenny Smith’s infrequent video analysis is often more about the foot race to the board.
Is it all entertaining? Sure. But it’s entertaining because of the personalities. The game of the night is secondary to the personalities discussing it. This isn’t the first time I’ve brought this up, but I do think Adam Silver was right when he told then-podcaster sh “My frustration a bit, I think sometimes the color commentary in our games gets reduced to, ‘this team wanted it more’ or ‘this team tried harder.'”
ESPN fired Zach Lowe, widely considered one of the best basketball writers and analysts in the game, but gave Kendrick Perkins more money to fling his wild takes on a daily basis. Stephen A. Smith is ESPN’s main analyst for everything, and while he’s great at playing his role, it’s nothing more than than scorching takes.
Anyone watching CBS or Fox between noon and 4:30 p.m. can feel confident repeating what they’ve heard at work Monday, knowing they’ll sound somewhat informed about the sport they just watched. Anyone repeating what they heard on NBA Today or Inside the NBA runs the risk of sounding bitter and ill-informed.
It’s not that there isn’t a point to be made about how the game is played. Things have changed over the years. It’s jarring to see players flare out to the corners on a fast break. Watching cold shooting from 3 can make for some forgettable games. And the league has gotten too stylistically homogeneous, with all 30 teams trying to tick off the layups/free throws/3-pointers checkboxes. We don’t have the NBA version of “running team vs. passing team.” Every team is trying to follow the same recipe.
That means we’re not getting a tray of desserts every night with the options between pie, cake, and ice cream. Everyone is making some version of the same pie, and we just have to hope the chef is on point that night.
The league does have to constantly look at the product and make adjustments. It did so last season when the enforcement of the rules changed after the All-Star break to cut off the historic scoring nights. The league was on its way to someone scoring 200 points, which is just too much dessert for people to handle. And future rule changes might be necessary to further evolve the game.
But the game is still good. Within pursuing the same goals as every other team is a nuance that needs to be explained. The intricacies of things like screening and spacing, how defenses are manipulated, and the little decisions made throughout a game can’t be lost. The game is so much more than the ball going in or not, but fans don’t see much of that anywhere unless they search for it. There can be some nuance mixed in with the takes. Other sports manage to do it, yet it’s often lacking in NBA broadcasts.
One disadvantage of the NBA is the daily grind of a long season. All of this analysis and promotion of the product is out of the league’s hands, as opposed to the NFL where every game is handled by a national crew. It’s impossible to cover the league for seven months out of the year the way the NFL does, which opens the door to some of the problems I’m talking about. The NFL is full of objective coverage of the games by network employees once or twice a week while local NBA broadcasters are often team employees four or five times a week.
A single NFL game is put under a microscope and discussed ad nauseam. There are only 17 of them in the regular season, so each one feels critical to the team’s playoff picture. The NBA season is 82 games long, and we’re often told November and December games barely matter. The Celtics have lost five games and I, personally, don’t think any of them matter much in the bigger picture. The NBA Cup is supposed to alleviate some of that, but that's going to take a while, and maybe that will need a few evolutions before we figure out its place in addressing this issue.
The league does have to look at itself as part of this analysis as well. They aren’t the promotional juggernaut they used to be. They aren’t selling the game like they used to, with iconic campaigns like the classic “I love this game!” or “The NBA, it’s Fan-tastic.” The league isn’t promoting its hot young stars in small markets, like Shai Gilgeous-Alexander. Instead, NBA fans are force-fed Lakers content at every turn because it’s the biggest, most passionate market.
But that's just appealing to fans they know are there. They haven't taken the time to engage the fans of smaller markets with good players. Maybe they have to do a TV version of the trick we all play on our dogs to take their pills and wrap that coverage up in a Lakers shell, but it still needs to be done. We have evolved beyond pandering to only big markets. The league needs to promote everyone everywhere. They have to hitch their wagons to the stars and let them pull people in.
There are a lot of factors that go into why TV viewership is down. It’s not just “too many 3-pointers.” At the same time, TV viewership isn’t the only thing that matters here, so I’d caution people not to say the league is struggling to get people to consume its product.
How people watch and consume the NBA is evolving. There are things the league can do better, both on and off the court, to improve the product, but they also have to improve how the product gets to its consumers. The league has to consider the packaging and promotion as much as it has to consider rules and regulations as part of its way forward. There is a great opportunity to use this moment to reconsider everything and move forward with the times. They should take great care to examine it all, or they’ll miss their chance to fix something very fixable before it breaks.
