Can we finally put to bed the belief that the NBA is on life support and on the verge of collapse as a league?
In the early months of the season, hysteria over the league’s less-than-impressive television ratings reached a fever pitch, and criticism of the NBA as a whole was nearing an all-time high.
The proliferation of the three-point shot is ruining the game, everybody is playing the same style of basketball, load management is killing the league and alienating fans, there are no young superstars to be the next face of the league. On and on and on it went. Things were so bad that NBA commissioner Adam Silver even floated 10-minute quarters to fundamentally change the game and make it more fan-friendly. And the situation wasn’t made any better by the constant criticism of the NBA from their own television rights partners.
That narrative was compounded in February when the NHL hosted the first-ever 4 Nations Face-Off, which drew record audiences for hockey in a best-on-best international tournament while the NBA trotted out Kevin Hart and Mac McClung for the most soulless All-Star weekend in history. It became an NBA vs. NHL thing, and everyone in hockey was taking a victory lap like it was 1994 all over again.
But as the NBA season has played out, the real truth about the league’s health has come to light. And as it turns out, the NBA is doing just fine.
With just under a month in the regular season to go, the NBA’s television ratings are basically flat compared to last year’s, averaging 1.85 million viewers per game. However, their top national television property, the NBA on ABC, actually experienced a significant increase over last season.
Much like the NFL going woke and going broke, we will look back and laugh at all of the headlines about the NBA’s collapse in popularity.
And when looking ahead to the postseason, NBA ratings should only continue to grow this year. The league will benefit from its two biggest stars – LeBron James and Steph Curry – seeing the Lakers and Warriors resurrected into contenders once again. The trades of Luka Dončić and Jimmy Butler to each team has given them a new lease on life. Specifically, the shocking Dončić trade gave a new jolt of energy to the NBA season. Now that those teams aren’t going to be competing in play-in games, chances are they could both have lengthy postseason runs.
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And what better opportunity for the NBA to help build its next face of the league by seeing a young star like Shai Gilgeous-Alexander or Anthony Edwards go head-to-head with these living legends in the postseason?
The NBA should have been concerned seeing 20% drops early on in the season, but sometimes it actually pays to be patient and see if individual data points become trends or not. But the coverage of the NBA is a lot like your local evening news. There’s a reason why it always leads with car crashes, crime, and calamity. And with the NBA, it seems like all anyone ever wants to talk about is drama and not what actually happens on the court.
But let’s just take a step back from the ratings debate, and you will quickly realize that the NBA’s business is healthier than ever.
The NBA literally just signed new media deals valued at $76 billion over 11 years with ESPN, NBC, and Amazon. The association is set for the next decade. They have three of the biggest media companies in the world firmly invested in their success. The NBA will get the best of both linear exposure through NBC and ABC and streaming commitments through Amazon and Peacock, and it will be a major tentpole property for all of these companies for a long time to come.
On Thursday, reports emerged that the Boston Celtics were being sold to Bill Chisholm for $6.1 billion, the highest price ever paid for a professional sports franchise. The NBA is also looking at expansion in the coming years, with two new franchises likely and Las Vegas and Seattle being touted as the most logical destinations.
Does this sound like a dying league to you? Does this sound like a league that needs to reinvent itself or make drastic changes completely? Does it sound like a league experiencing a crisis and a stunning collapse in popularity?
If so, then pretty much every other sport not named the NFL would sign up for all the trouble the NBA has gone through this year.