The NBA’s dwindling viewership and precarious outreach plans
The NBA's dwindling viewership and precarious outreach plans...
By Ethan Strauss 55m ago
21
Every year, roughly a month before the season starts, the league’s beleaguered head coaches meet in Chicago and communicate directly with a source of their many woes. Most fans have never heard of the annual National Basketball Coaches Association meetings, but they are one of the NBA’s major rituals. All who can make the journey show up, mingle and speak with league officials on what rules are bound to govern their working lives. There are briefings, communication with referees and ultimately, a speech from the commissioner.
The annual speech isn’t available to the public, so it tends to contain franker messaging than you might find in Adam Silver’s news conferences. This year was no exception. While the NBA has publicly indicated that there’s been a dropoff in ratings, that message gets conveyed with subtlety. In person, with the coaches, Silver was blunt, according to sources at the meeting. Viewership is down, said the commissioner, down so significantly that he badly needs the help of the men present. They must do what it takes to aid the occasionally intrusive TV broadcasts, even if that means going outside their comfort zones.
This fits with a common push-pull dynamic behind the scenes of the league, where the NBA asks for more inside access from coaches who would prefer to jealously guard their focus and privacy. Coaches don’t just resent the feeling of being spied on by TV cameras; they fear the consequences. Once a communication with a player goes public, it opens them up to scrutiny, while changing the nature of how that message might get received.
For example, Steve Kerr and the Warriors were not happy when ABC captured and televised a private conversation the coach had with Kevin Durant in Game 5 of the 2018 Western Conference finals. The speech from Kerr on how KD might learn from Michael Jordan’s playoff game foibles made for great television, but the last thing the Warriors wanted was a public showing of criticism toward KD, however constructive and however couched. Going forward, the league is hoping to forge a process that avoids such mishaps. Of course, with the continued cooperation of the coaches.
Coaches might not like Silver’s request for access, but they appreciate the manner in which it is communicated. Silver is seen as proactive and open-minded. Feedback is welcome, even if it isn’t always implemented.
“This guy gives out his phone number and tells us to call him!” one coach said, in disbelief. “David Stern would never do that.”
The previous commissioner’s old NBCA speeches did not welcome such participation, especially the one given in Chicago, shortly after the NBA had signed its 2007 national TV contract. According to multiple coaches who were there, Stern communicated the importance of the TV side having access to locker rooms. Then-Chicago Bulls coach Scott Skiles raised his hand and told Stern, after a preamble of “no disrespect,” that the locker room was his “sacred space.”
Based on multiple coaches’ retellings of this legendary league story, Stern dispatched the response with withering sarcasm.
“Well, let’s see,” the smiling commissioner began. “On the one hand, we have eight billion dollars from our broadcast partners. And on the other hand, we have … Scott Skiles!” Stern then lit into him, telling Skiles in so many words and curses to shut up and that he didn’t want to hear any more out him. Skiles went quiet, as did the room.
“He was neutered,” one coach relayed of Skiles. “Scott thought he was brave. And after Stern was done with him, he wasn’t brave no more.” All the coaches in the room got the message. Commissioner Stern wasn’t asking. He was telling. And woe be unto whichever clipboard clinger flouted the dictate.
When asked about the incident recently, Skiles told The Athletic, “I no longer do interviews about basketball. But whatever you are referring to is completely false. The commissioner never went at me or anyone in a harsh manner. You’ve gotten incorrect info.” Last week, Stern himself said, “No recollection at all. Not denying.” Make of that what you will.
Fast-forward to this fall, when Silver didn’t blow a gasket on any coach in Chicago, but he could be forgiven for feeling the impulse. The modern NBA has many issues to sort out. They are well buoyed by a lucrative national television contract, signed at perhaps the height of the TV rights bubble, that grants the league an annual payment of $2.66 billion until 2024-2025. In the meantime, for all its coverage as a fun, modern league, the NBA’s TV ratings are sliding in the United States.
For so long, ascendance has been a dominant theme of NBA coverage. The league’s fans are so young, the sport’s never been more popular, etc. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar submitted one such example of this argument back in a December 2017 article for The Guardian titled, “The NBA, and not the NFL, is the league of America’s future.”
In it, he wrote, “This prediction has nothing to do with the athletes themselves, their level of skill, their heart, or their commitment to their sport. Professional athletes are generally the highest expression of what the human body is capable of doing and therefore inspiring to the fans to reach higher and strive harder. In that way, no sport is superior to any other sport. But when it comes to professional sports, some are more inspirational, more exciting and more entertaining to the general public than others and those sports take on a symbolic meaning for Americans. They come to represent our core values. They represent not just who we are, but who we want to be.”
Abdul-Jabbar said this at perhaps the height of NFL pessimism. The article came during a brief epoch of NFL ratings declines that happened concurrently with fans dividing into pro- and anti-Colin Kaepernick camps. The NFL has since rebounded from its swoon, seeing ratings gains last season and early this season. The Lakers legend could still be right in the end, but I suspect he’s wrong about a sport’s popularity reflecting a kind of noble aspiration.
The resilience of American football reminds of Warren Buffet’s investing strategy. Buffet has become the third-wealthiest person in the world while establishing stakes in Dairy Queen, See’s Candies and Coca-Cola, among other junk-food providers. In theory, these brands are behind the times and primed for a fall when an ever savvier population switches to the healthier diets they aspire to. In reality, human beings can’t get away so easily from their base instincts. In our inevitable weak moments, we will falter, furtively mainlining refined sugar in between Instagram posts of our gym workouts. Similarly, it appears the better angels of our nature cannot win out against the violence of football. The American population is drawn to the game on a visceral level, and no amount of “60 Minutes” stories on CTE will topple the nation’s favorite sport.
Meanwhile, it’s the NBA that’s struggled of late. If the NBA is “who we want to be,” then the American people are only so interested in our goals. It took a while for the league to hit a snag, to be sure. LeBron James saved the NBA from its post-Jordan nadir. Then he chose South Beach and became a compelling, ratings-friendly villain. His return to Cleveland mended broken hearts, concurrent with the Warriors’ rise. The latter dynamic fueled some of the best nationally televised ratings the league had seen since MJ.
While the Warriors’ dynastic run buoyed national TV ratings, many other teams saw declines locally. Based on the Sports Business Journal’s annual check-ups, in the 2014-15 season, 16 of 27 measured teams saw year-over-year declines in their local ratings. In the 2015-16 season, 17 of the 27 teams measured saw declines. In the 2016-17 season, local ratings dropped 14 percent overall. Those ratings bounced up 3 percent in 2017-18, only to fall back down 4 percent last season. It’s been a rough half-decade overall.
Recent playoffs paint a slightly prettier picture, though one almost completely propped up by the Warriors vs. LeBron and the Cavs dynamic. With LeBron’s Lakers missing the postseason, the first three rounds of last season’s playoffs saw a sharp 14-percent drop from the prior playoffs. Fortunately for the NBA, James will probably make the postseason cut this time, flanked by Anthony Davis. Unfortunately for the NBA, there are some less auspicious developments at play. Kyrie Irving left an ardently followed Celtics team in big-market Boston for a big market in Brooklyn that’s only ever yielded small-market viewership. Kevin Durant followed him there, and is out for the season. The Warriors, that dependable ratings machine, are a much worse team this season, with Klay Thompson recovering from an ACL tear. Historically hyped No. 1 pick Zion Williamson fell to New Orleans, one of the league’s smallest markets, rather than to the forever dormant Knicks.
It might sound like sacrilege, but it’s more than likely that the NBA is losing domestic popularity now and in the near term, despite its ever-sold narrative of a perpetual ascendance. Yes, the NBA is young, steeped in the social media zeitgeist and theoretically primed to take over when those other dusty sports die out. No, this dynamic isn’t yet resulting in demonstrable viewership growth in America.
What about cord-cutting?
Bring up the NBA’s ratings declines and someone might cite cord-cutting as an excuse. Aren’t all the leagues suffering? Yes and no. It’s more difficult to command big audiences in prime time than it was in the past, but certain sports have fared better than others. Baseball has seen recent ratings declines similar to the NBA, but, as previously mentioned, the NFL has seen viewership gains of late and college football has held steady.
For a quick and dirty comparison, look at average NBA Finals viewership over the years versus average Super Bowl viewership. In 1998, Michael Jordan’s last Finals registered as the most watched in NBA history, yielding an average viewership of 29 million. The best Finals viewership since Jordan happened in 2017, the year of Kareem’s article, when the Durant-led Warriors first took on LeBron’s Cavs. That Finals yielded an average viewership of 20.38 million. Impressive, but roughly down 9 million from that high in 1998. Keep in mind, the U.S. overall gained 50 million in population between 1998 and 2017.
For contemporaneous contrast, the January 1998 Super Bowl drew of an average of 90 million viewers. Nearly two decades later, the February 2017 Super Bowl drew an average viewership of 111.3 million viewers. In short, the NFL has added 10s of millions in viewers to its championship since the 1990s, while the NBA has remained flat at best and dwindling at worst.
What about streaming?
Well, maybe the NBA, with all its millennial fans, suffers more from cord-cutting than the NFL. Perhaps all those people who used to watch games on TV are now watching games on other devices. The NBA usually casts such growth in relative terms. According to the league, digital viewership increased 47 percent versus last year.
Here’s the issue. While digital certainly is a growth market, the vast majority of people still prefer watching sports on actual television sets. Streaming numbers are difficult to come by, but within North America, they are often not so impressive, compared to overall viewership. To cite a positive NBA stat, 15.9 million Canadians watched the Raptors win Game 6 of the NBA Finals on TSN. To give you a sense of how niche streaming can be, only 143,000 people viewed the TSN live stream for that same game. In other words, the televised Raptors Finals clincher had 111 times the audience of the livestreamed version. Given that conversion, it is highly doubtful that, in the U.S., TV ratings declines are being compensated for with digital gains.
Time zone effect
The league has admitted to a recent ratings drop, and it mostly attributes the decline to LeBron heading West, outside the preferable Eastern time zone. Silver explained, “Fifty percent of television households in this country are in the Eastern time zone. And so if your West Coast games start at 10:30 at night in the East, you’re invariably going to lose a lot of viewers around 11, 11:30. I mean, you can just chart it. You see how many television households turn off around 11:15, 11:30 at night, just because people have to get up for work in the morning.”
That explanation doesn’t quite explain everything, given the team James joined. The Lakers might be the league’s biggest brand. Their market includes not just Southern California, but Hawaii and Las Vegas as well. A superstar joining the Lakers shouldn’t be what tanks TV ratings.
Still, there’s something to the idea of correcting suboptimal game starts. Silver, in a proactive move, has gotten behind shaping the schedule to account for those pesky Pacific start times. The league has announced that nationally televised 10:30 starts have been reduced from 56 last season to 33 this one. The Lakers will go down from 19 nationally televised 10:30 starts to 10 in the upcoming season. We shall see if it works.
What about social media?
#NBATwitter is a thing. Much of the ascendence narrative comes with praise over how the league dominates social media platforms. One slight issue: Such dominance does not appear to gin up much interest in watching the actual games. The NBA sells games, not feuds between stars and not news of transactions. Games. You know, the contests Allen Iverson so desperately wanted us to talk about.
Perhaps all the off-court drama helps the NBA in some peripheral way, but it wouldn’t be so inconceivable to think that it’s hurting. As Pat Riley was fond of saying, “Keep the main thing the main thing.” Is the NBA doing that when so much of its coverage is devoted to something other than the games themselves?
The NBA's dwindling viewership and precarious outreach plans...
By Ethan Strauss 55m ago
Every year, roughly a month before the season starts, the league’s beleaguered head coaches meet in Chicago and communicate directly with a source of their many woes. Most fans have never heard of the annual National Basketball Coaches Association meetings, but they are one of the NBA’s major rituals. All who can make the journey show up, mingle and speak with league officials on what rules are bound to govern their working lives. There are briefings, communication with referees and ultimately, a speech from the commissioner.
The annual speech isn’t available to the public, so it tends to contain franker messaging than you might find in Adam Silver’s news conferences. This year was no exception. While the NBA has publicly indicated that there’s been a dropoff in ratings, that message gets conveyed with subtlety. In person, with the coaches, Silver was blunt, according to sources at the meeting. Viewership is down, said the commissioner, down so significantly that he badly needs the help of the men present. They must do what it takes to aid the occasionally intrusive TV broadcasts, even if that means going outside their comfort zones.
This fits with a common push-pull dynamic behind the scenes of the league, where the NBA asks for more inside access from coaches who would prefer to jealously guard their focus and privacy. Coaches don’t just resent the feeling of being spied on by TV cameras; they fear the consequences. Once a communication with a player goes public, it opens them up to scrutiny, while changing the nature of how that message might get received.
For example, Steve Kerr and the Warriors were not happy when ABC captured and televised a private conversation the coach had with Kevin Durant in Game 5 of the 2018 Western Conference finals. The speech from Kerr on how KD might learn from Michael Jordan’s playoff game foibles made for great television, but the last thing the Warriors wanted was a public showing of criticism toward KD, however constructive and however couched. Going forward, the league is hoping to forge a process that avoids such mishaps. Of course, with the continued cooperation of the coaches.
Coaches might not like Silver’s request for access, but they appreciate the manner in which it is communicated. Silver is seen as proactive and open-minded. Feedback is welcome, even if it isn’t always implemented.
“This guy gives out his phone number and tells us to call him!” one coach said, in disbelief. “David Stern would never do that.”
The previous commissioner’s old NBCA speeches did not welcome such participation, especially the one given in Chicago, shortly after the NBA had signed its 2007 national TV contract. According to multiple coaches who were there, Stern communicated the importance of the TV side having access to locker rooms. Then-Chicago Bulls coach Scott Skiles raised his hand and told Stern, after a preamble of “no disrespect,” that the locker room was his “sacred space.”
Based on multiple coaches’ retellings of this legendary league story, Stern dispatched the response with withering sarcasm.
“Well, let’s see,” the smiling commissioner began. “On the one hand, we have eight billion dollars from our broadcast partners. And on the other hand, we have … Scott Skiles!” Stern then lit into him, telling Skiles in so many words and curses to shut up and that he didn’t want to hear any more out him. Skiles went quiet, as did the room.
“He was neutered,” one coach relayed of Skiles. “Scott thought he was brave. And after Stern was done with him, he wasn’t brave no more.” All the coaches in the room got the message. Commissioner Stern wasn’t asking. He was telling. And woe be unto whichever clipboard clinger flouted the dictate.
When asked about the incident recently, Skiles told The Athletic, “I no longer do interviews about basketball. But whatever you are referring to is completely false. The commissioner never went at me or anyone in a harsh manner. You’ve gotten incorrect info.” Last week, Stern himself said, “No recollection at all. Not denying.” Make of that what you will.
Fast-forward to this fall, when Silver didn’t blow a gasket on any coach in Chicago, but he could be forgiven for feeling the impulse. The modern NBA has many issues to sort out. They are well buoyed by a lucrative national television contract, signed at perhaps the height of the TV rights bubble, that grants the league an annual payment of $2.66 billion until 2024-2025. In the meantime, for all its coverage as a fun, modern league, the NBA’s TV ratings are sliding in the United States.
For so long, ascendance has been a dominant theme of NBA coverage. The league’s fans are so young, the sport’s never been more popular, etc. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar submitted one such example of this argument back in a December 2017 article for The Guardian titled, “The NBA, and not the NFL, is the league of America’s future.”
In it, he wrote, “This prediction has nothing to do with the athletes themselves, their level of skill, their heart, or their commitment to their sport. Professional athletes are generally the highest expression of what the human body is capable of doing and therefore inspiring to the fans to reach higher and strive harder. In that way, no sport is superior to any other sport. But when it comes to professional sports, some are more inspirational, more exciting and more entertaining to the general public than others and those sports take on a symbolic meaning for Americans. They come to represent our core values. They represent not just who we are, but who we want to be.”
Abdul-Jabbar said this at perhaps the height of NFL pessimism. The article came during a brief epoch of NFL ratings declines that happened concurrently with fans dividing into pro- and anti-Colin Kaepernick camps. The NFL has since rebounded from its swoon, seeing ratings gains last season and early this season. The Lakers legend could still be right in the end, but I suspect he’s wrong about a sport’s popularity reflecting a kind of noble aspiration.
The resilience of American football reminds of Warren Buffet’s investing strategy. Buffet has become the third-wealthiest person in the world while establishing stakes in Dairy Queen, See’s Candies and Coca-Cola, among other junk-food providers. In theory, these brands are behind the times and primed for a fall when an ever savvier population switches to the healthier diets they aspire to. In reality, human beings can’t get away so easily from their base instincts. In our inevitable weak moments, we will falter, furtively mainlining refined sugar in between Instagram posts of our gym workouts. Similarly, it appears the better angels of our nature cannot win out against the violence of football. The American population is drawn to the game on a visceral level, and no amount of “60 Minutes” stories on CTE will topple the nation’s favorite sport.
Meanwhile, it’s the NBA that’s struggled of late. If the NBA is “who we want to be,” then the American people are only so interested in our goals. It took a while for the league to hit a snag, to be sure. LeBron James saved the NBA from its post-Jordan nadir. Then he chose South Beach and became a compelling, ratings-friendly villain. His return to Cleveland mended broken hearts, concurrent with the Warriors’ rise. The latter dynamic fueled some of the best nationally televised ratings the league had seen since MJ.
While the Warriors’ dynastic run buoyed national TV ratings, many other teams saw declines locally. Based on the Sports Business Journal’s annual check-ups, in the 2014-15 season, 16 of 27 measured teams saw year-over-year declines in their local ratings. In the 2015-16 season, 17 of the 27 teams measured saw declines. In the 2016-17 season, local ratings dropped 14 percent overall. Those ratings bounced up 3 percent in 2017-18, only to fall back down 4 percent last season. It’s been a rough half-decade overall.
Recent playoffs paint a slightly prettier picture, though one almost completely propped up by the Warriors vs. LeBron and the Cavs dynamic. With LeBron’s Lakers missing the postseason, the first three rounds of last season’s playoffs saw a sharp 14-percent drop from the prior playoffs. Fortunately for the NBA, James will probably make the postseason cut this time, flanked by Anthony Davis. Unfortunately for the NBA, there are some less auspicious developments at play. Kyrie Irving left an ardently followed Celtics team in big-market Boston for a big market in Brooklyn that’s only ever yielded small-market viewership. Kevin Durant followed him there, and is out for the season. The Warriors, that dependable ratings machine, are a much worse team this season, with Klay Thompson recovering from an ACL tear. Historically hyped No. 1 pick Zion Williamson fell to New Orleans, one of the league’s smallest markets, rather than to the forever dormant Knicks.
It might sound like sacrilege, but it’s more than likely that the NBA is losing domestic popularity now and in the near term, despite its ever-sold narrative of a perpetual ascendance. Yes, the NBA is young, steeped in the social media zeitgeist and theoretically primed to take over when those other dusty sports die out. No, this dynamic isn’t yet resulting in demonstrable viewership growth in America.
What about cord-cutting?
Bring up the NBA’s ratings declines and someone might cite cord-cutting as an excuse. Aren’t all the leagues suffering? Yes and no. It’s more difficult to command big audiences in prime time than it was in the past, but certain sports have fared better than others. Baseball has seen recent ratings declines similar to the NBA, but, as previously mentioned, the NFL has seen viewership gains of late and college football has held steady.
For a quick and dirty comparison, look at average NBA Finals viewership over the years versus average Super Bowl viewership. In 1998, Michael Jordan’s last Finals registered as the most watched in NBA history, yielding an average viewership of 29 million. The best Finals viewership since Jordan happened in 2017, the year of Kareem’s article, when the Durant-led Warriors first took on LeBron’s Cavs. That Finals yielded an average viewership of 20.38 million. Impressive, but roughly down 9 million from that high in 1998. Keep in mind, the U.S. overall gained 50 million in population between 1998 and 2017.
For contemporaneous contrast, the January 1998 Super Bowl drew of an average of 90 million viewers. Nearly two decades later, the February 2017 Super Bowl drew an average viewership of 111.3 million viewers. In short, the NFL has added 10s of millions in viewers to its championship since the 1990s, while the NBA has remained flat at best and dwindling at worst.
What about streaming?
Well, maybe the NBA, with all its millennial fans, suffers more from cord-cutting than the NFL. Perhaps all those people who used to watch games on TV are now watching games on other devices. The NBA usually casts such growth in relative terms. According to the league, digital viewership increased 47 percent versus last year.
Here’s the issue. While digital certainly is a growth market, the vast majority of people still prefer watching sports on actual television sets. Streaming numbers are difficult to come by, but within North America, they are often not so impressive, compared to overall viewership. To cite a positive NBA stat, 15.9 million Canadians watched the Raptors win Game 6 of the NBA Finals on TSN. To give you a sense of how niche streaming can be, only 143,000 people viewed the TSN live stream for that same game. In other words, the televised Raptors Finals clincher had 111 times the audience of the livestreamed version. Given that conversion, it is highly doubtful that, in the U.S., TV ratings declines are being compensated for with digital gains.
Time zone effect
The league has admitted to a recent ratings drop, and it mostly attributes the decline to LeBron heading West, outside the preferable Eastern time zone. Silver explained, “Fifty percent of television households in this country are in the Eastern time zone. And so if your West Coast games start at 10:30 at night in the East, you’re invariably going to lose a lot of viewers around 11, 11:30. I mean, you can just chart it. You see how many television households turn off around 11:15, 11:30 at night, just because people have to get up for work in the morning.”
That explanation doesn’t quite explain everything, given the team James joined. The Lakers might be the league’s biggest brand. Their market includes not just Southern California, but Hawaii and Las Vegas as well. A superstar joining the Lakers shouldn’t be what tanks TV ratings.
Still, there’s something to the idea of correcting suboptimal game starts. Silver, in a proactive move, has gotten behind shaping the schedule to account for those pesky Pacific start times. The league has announced that nationally televised 10:30 starts have been reduced from 56 last season to 33 this one. The Lakers will go down from 19 nationally televised 10:30 starts to 10 in the upcoming season. We shall see if it works.
What about social media?
#NBATwitter is a thing. Much of the ascendence narrative comes with praise over how the league dominates social media platforms. One slight issue: Such dominance does not appear to gin up much interest in watching the actual games. The NBA sells games, not feuds between stars and not news of transactions. Games. You know, the contests Allen Iverson so desperately wanted us to talk about.
Perhaps all the off-court drama helps the NBA in some peripheral way, but it wouldn’t be so inconceivable to think that it’s hurting. As Pat Riley was fond of saying, “Keep the main thing the main thing.” Is the NBA doing that when so much of its coverage is devoted to something other than the games themselves?
