Before the season started, the question hanging over the NBA’s new media landscape wasn’t whether the product was good. It was whether anyone could find it.
The league had just completed its $76 billion media rights deal — an 11-year agreement that ended TNT’s 40-year relationship with the NBA and split the league’s games across NBC, Peacock, ESPN, ABC, and Amazon Prime Video. For the first time, a meaningful chunk of NBA games would live exclusively on streaming.
No sport in America has a younger fan base than the NBA, and those fans have been abandoning cable for years — not cutting the cord, but never signing up in the first place — what Silver himself called cord-nevers. The bet the league was making was that scattering games across five platforms would bring it closer to where those fans already spent their time. The concern was that it would just make the games harder to find.
At All-Star weekend this week, Silver said he has his answer.
“We have a very young audience, and people were predicting that ratings would go down because our audience wouldn’t find the games since they were no longer on cable,” the NBA commissioner said on Sunday. “It’s been the exact opposite. So many of our young fans were disenfranchised by traditional cable because the data is clear — they’re just not subscribing to cable packages. They’re spending their time on streaming services. So by virtue of ESPN now, you can get that directly as a streaming service, obviously Amazon Prime, Peacock, NBC — our fans are finding those games in record numbers.”
Adam Silver:
“We have a very young audience and people we’re predicting that ratings would go down because our audience wouldn’t find the games since they were no longer on cable. It’s been the exact opposite. Our fans are finding those games in record numbers.
These new teams… pic.twitter.com/Axq09jy3tm
— Oh No He Didn’t (@ohnohedidnt24) February 15, 2026
He also credited the new broadcast partners, specifically NBC, Amazon, and ESPN, for what they’ve built around the games.
“These new teams on NBC, on Amazon Prime, the ESPN stepped up — they have their new studio show,” Silver said. “Look, we’re an entertainment product at the end of the day. The game on the floor is one thing, but fans want to hear stories. They want to learn about players. They want to know what their backgrounds are, what their interests are.”
Silver pointed to Tyrese Maxey running dogs at the National Dog Show on Thanksgiving as an example of where he thinks the league is headed — building micro-connections between players and casual fans through content that has nothing to do with basketball. With 45% of American households owning dogs, Silver said, that’s a point of connection with an NBA star that didn’t exist before. Technology, he said, is allowing the league to build those connections in ways it never could, what he called the “hyperlocalization” of NBA games.
The numbers — at least so far — back him up
According to Sports Media Watch, the league is averaging 1.80 million viewers per game across its national partners — up 16% from last year and the best number at this point in the season since 2018. NBC has been the biggest driver, averaging 2.6 million per game, nearly double what TNT drew in the same windows last year. ESPN and ABC are up 18% at 2.06 million. The five Christmas Day games — all on ABC and ESPN — accounted for three of the top four most-watched games of the season, headlined by 6.71 million viewers for Spurs-Thunder.
And more people are at least sampling the league than at any point in over a decade. Reach — the number of viewers who watched at least one minute of any game — is up 87%, to more than 138 million, the highest since 2011.
Not everyone has been convinced that the transition is seamless. Michael Wilbon and Charles Barkley sat down for dinner in Arizona this season, decided they wanted to watch a game, and couldn’t figure out where to find it. Two people employed full-time to talk about basketball on national television had no idea which platform was carrying the game that night.
Silver’s answer to that is essentially that the data tells a different story from the anecdotes. He’s probably right that young fans aren’t going back to cable. Whether they build the kind of consistent viewing habits across five platforms that they once had with one is what the next few seasons will determine.