Alex Caruso, a guard for the Oklahoma City Thunder, has played in the big markets. He was on the Los Angeles Lakers team that won that franchise’s 17th championship. He played in Chicago.
Now, in one of the league’s smallest cities, he sees firsthand how much less media coverage the smaller markets get. Despite setting a franchise record for wins behind the league’s most valuable player, the Thunder had little or no press visiting them at times.
To some degree, Caruso gets it. “Part of the reason we get paid so well is because we have attention on the league and people watch the league, and a lot of that has to do with the millions of people in the big markets,” he said.
Still, he thinks it’s a missed opportunity.
“Oklahoma City’s been here for 17 years, but they treat it like they’ve won 17 titles, too,” Caruso said. “The connection that our fan base has to us is like a Michigan football, it’s like a Kentucky basketball.”
This season has offered the National Basketball Association a case study in what happens when the best teams play in less populous cities. The smaller the market, the more challenging it is to stoke appeal beyond it, even as a changing media landscape alters the way fans consume sports.
It’s possible that the NBA finals will feature two of the smallest markets if the Thunder beat the Minnesota Timberwolves and the Indiana Pacers beat the New York Knicks in the current round. The Thunder and the Pacers are teams with a lot of talent but not many big names.
A playoff season dominated by small markets has traditionally been seen as a bad thing. But this year, there are signs that this may no longer matter as much.
After a few decades dominated by superstars and superteams, the NBA has deliberately shrunk the gap between its best and worst teams. In sports, this is known as parity. It keeps team owners happy and gives more franchises a shot at a championship.
“It encourages all of the fans from all of the teams to believe their team has a chance in the next year,” said Rick Burton, a professor of sports management at Syracuse University, who was the commissioner of the Australian-based National Basketball League from 2003 to 2007.
But is parity good for business? The league is about to find out.
Anyone’s playoffs
Parity has, among other things, made this year’s playoffs wildly unpredictable (and, for fans, more fun). There have been upsets, comeback wins and buzzer beaters from big- and small-market teams alike. The Thunder are the only top-two seed from either conference to make it to the conference finals.
Through the first 11 games of the postseason, ESPN drew its largest NBA playoff audience ever, the network said, though marquee teams such as the Lakers, Knicks, Boston Celtics and Golden State Warriors were part of that increase. Viewership through the second round was up 3% from last year.
The financial health of the league may not depend as much on traditional television ratings as it once did, though media contracts generate a large part of its revenue. The league is measuring social media views just as much as it does viewers of its broadcasts, and has given YouTube content creators access to game highlights. Competition among networks, cable channels and streamers for sports programming, one of the last remaining things that people watch live, helped drive up the price for its rights: The NBA signed an 11-year deal with Disney (ESPN’s parent company), Amazon and NBC worth about $77 billion that will start next season.
But it’s also true that when the Knicks excel, more people watch.
New York City has 7.5 million television households, the most of any U.S. market, according to Nielsen. Oklahoma City has just 762,700, ranking its market size 47th. Predictably, the second-round playoff series between the Knicks and the Celtics, a mammoth market versus a top-10 market steeped in tradition, drew the largest audience, averaging 5.36 million viewers. And Game 1 of the Eastern Conference finals between the Knicks and Pacers averaged 6.6 million viewers, according to Nielsen. It was the most-watched Game 1 of an Eastern Conference finals since 2018.
The first game of the Western Conference finals on Tuesday between the Timberwolves and Thunder drew 5.36 million viewers, a low number next to last year’s comparable games.
In general, though, the chaos of these playoffs has held viewers’ attention, showing that smaller markets can draw big audiences in the right conditions. Game 7 of the series between the Thunder and the Denver Nuggets, whose winner would advance to the conference finals, averaged 6.34 million viewers on ABC, more than the ESPN game Friday night in which the Knicks clinched their conference finals berth.
The Christmas Day slot
The strong playoff numbers weren’t a given. “NBA regular-season ratings were a bit of a piñata across sports media publications and podcasts,” Matt Kenny, ESPN’s vice president of programming and acquisitions, said in early May. The ratings early in the season were down significantly from last year but improved steadily, thanks to big stories such as the Dallas Mavericks’ surprise trade of their star, Luka Doncic, to the Lakers.
But the best basketball was played in less populous places. The Thunder were beating teams by record margins on their way to the best record in the league. One thousand miles northeast of them, the Cleveland Cavaliers (in the bottom half of NBA markets, with 1.5 million television households, and no more LeBron James) were dominating the Eastern Conference.
Market size still affects game selection. Despite being the top-seeded team in the Western Conference last year, the Thunder were left out of many of the marquee slots on this season’s television schedule, which the league sets in consultation with its networks. They didn’t play opening night. They didn’t play Christmas. This was also true of the Pacers, who had gone to the Eastern Conference finals in 2024.
Jake Query, a prominent sports radio host in Indianapolis, said he wouldn’t be surprised if the Pacers were left off next year’s five-game Christmas schedule as well, even though they have a chance at this year’s championship.
“We still have the same inferiority complex that we had when we were ‘Indianoplace,’” Query said, referring to a nickname for the city that’s considered derogatory or self-deprecating, depending on who uses it.
But this season, the networks adapted as it became clear that these smaller-market teams would be impossible to ignore.
When the Cavaliers played the Thunder on a Wednesday in January, ESPN gave the game a prominent nationally televised spot, removing a Knicks game to do it. It was one of 15 scheduling changes the network made this season, the most it has ever done. The game’s ratings were 20% higher than they were in the same time slot the previous season.
The Parity Era
There was a time when the NBA was built on dynasties. The Chicago Bulls won six championships with Michael Jordan. The Lakers have 17 and the Celtics 18, many of them coming in clusters.
Then came the LeBron James era of the NBA finals.
From 2011 to 2018, every championship round featured James. He won two titles in four years with the Miami Heat, one against an upstart Oklahoma City team. He won one in four years in Cleveland, bumping up each time against the Stephen Curry-led Warriors, who won three.
The teams left out of those dynasties looked enviously at the National Football League, where success was less concentrated.
To achieve that parity, the NBA has increased incentives over the last decade for players to stay with the teams that drafted them by allowing them to make far more money with those teams. The league’s current collective bargaining agreement with its players, signed in 2023, stipulates penalties that limit the team-building moves that franchises can make if they spend too much, even beyond the tax that had already been imposed on big spenders.
“It’s not necessarily artificial parity, where we keep moving the chips around and saying we want to go into every season and make sure every team has an equal chance,” the league’s commissioner, Adam Silver, said in September. “You want each team to be in a position where if, well managed, they’re in a position to compete.”
But that also means the best teams may have players who are less familiar to casual fans, since viewers aren’t seeing the same players on the biggest stages year after year. When the Warriors and Cavaliers played each other in the finals, the games averaged nearly 20 million viewers. Last year’s finals averaged 11.3 million. This year’s winner will be the seventh new champion in the past seven years.
And stars draw viewers, of course. Burton, the Syracuse professor, said understanding how to cultivate them was part of the brilliance of David Stern, who was the NBA’s commissioner from 1984 to 2014, a period of enormous growth.
“You’re not going to make Oklahoma City a bigger market, but you can make their best player a lot more well known to the average basketball fan,” Burton said.
The best player on the Thunder, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, has superstar talent. He won the league’s Most Valuable Player Award this season and is the face of Converse’s basketball shoe division.
But the Thunder’s team culture echoes the league’s; they have developed a kind of internal parity where players are made to feel equal to one another. It works well for their basketball goals.
When sideline reporters try to interview the star of a Thunder game at the end of broadcasts, for instance, the rest of the team joins him.
And on the back wall of the team store hang rows of jerseys representing 12 of the players on Oklahoma City’s 15-man roster. Two other players’ jerseys can be found with a little searching.
A store employee explained that at the moment it didn’t have any Kenrich Williams jerseys, but that they could be custom-made. The employee had sold two just that day. Williams, a reserve player little known outside Oklahoma City, is quite popular.
In Oklahoma City, the Thunder are everything, even if they aren’t everywhere else.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Copyright 2025
This story was originally published May 26, 2025 at 2:04 PM.