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Tom Mayenknecht: NBA also enjoying a surge while baseball gets ready to join the party
Published Feb 13, 2026 • Last updated 1 minute ago • 3 minute read
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Bad Bunny performs during halftime of the NFL Super Bowl 60 football game between the New England Patriots and the Seattle Seahawks, Feb. 8, 2026, in Santa Clara, Calif. Photo by Julio Cortez /AP
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Bulls of the week
The NFL didn’t set as many television records as it hoped to going into Super Bowl LX last weekend in San Francisco. The Shield settled for second best all-time in the U.S. (125 million average national audience) and a top-10 all-time in Canada (6.8 million). Notable, however, was the Apple Music Halftime Show featuring Bad Bunny; the third most-watched on television (average audience of 129 million) and easily the most-consumed of all time when including digital, YouTube TV and other social platforms. It certainly was the most talked about halftime show since Janet Jackson had her wardrobe malfunction in 2004.
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The Seattle-New England matchup set records for peak viewership, with a U.S. television record of 137.8 million tuning in for the second quarter. The game, however, couldn’t sustain that audience after the Seahawks took a two-possession lead in the third quarter and outscored the Patriots 17-13 in the fourth quarter, en route to the 29-13 win.
There were plenty of winners, including Seattle’s Kenneth Walker, III — who will surely monetize his Super Bowl MVP selection — and Seahawks’ quarterback Sam Darnold, who joined Walker at Disneyland and saw the narrative of his career change forever with his fifth team.
Yet the biggest winner of all? The Paul G. Allen Trust, owners and operators of the Seattle Seahawks franchise under the custodianship of the late owner’s sister Jody Allen. The team will go to market and be sold within months, with all proceeds of the sale going to charity. That’s a huge win for the charities designated by the estate, especially given a projected sale price of $8.5 to $10 billion.
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Bears of the week
There’s a lot to like about the NBA going into its all-star extravaganza this weekend at the Intuit Dome in Inglewood, California, including the technical genius of the host venue. Television ratings for the association continue to surge on the strength of its new media partnerships with ESPN/ABC, Amazon Prime and NBC/Peacock. NBC is back in the fold for the first time since 2002, marking its return last week with a Sunday night doubleheader that averaged 3.7 million viewers and a marquee game between the New York Knicks and Los Angeles Lakers that drew an average national audience of 4.5 million Americans. What’s more, the NBA seems ready to expand to Las Vegas and return to Seattle. It gets new media and has proved it again by inviting more than 200 global content creators to Los Angeles for the all-star weekend’s tech summit. All of that is good stuff.
The problem is a lot of the good news — including the aforementioned bullish television ratings and streaming numbers — is being overshadowed by the NBA’s tanking problem. What began as “load management” has morphed into outright no-shows this season, penalized by a series of six-figure fines this week to teams such as the Utah Jazz and Indiana Pacers. It has put the status quo into question, with calls for draft order and lottery reform among the biggest talking points in LA on this all-star weekend. And for good reason. If the NBA thought it had its hands full with sports betting scandals, some believe tanking and core player no-shows as an even bigger problem.
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Yet with pitchers and catchers reporting to training camp, there’s already talk of an impending bear market crash for Major League Baseball, even as it comes off an extremely popular 2025 regular season and record-setting global television audiences. The fear of a work stoppage and potentially no baseball in 2027 has set the tone for this coming season. There’s plenty of time for MLB to avoid Armageddon with CBA talks scheduled to begin in earnest in April. Yet make no mistake, the battle lines are being drawn between the owners and the MLB Players Association, to this day the strongest union in North American professional sport.
Tom Mayenknecht is the host of The Sport Market on Sportsnet 650 on Saturdays from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. The Vancouver-based sport business commentator and principal in Emblematica Brand Builders provides a behind-the-scenes look at the sport business stories that matter most to fans. Follow Mayenknecht at: x.com/TheSportMarket.
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