For the last two weeks, the sports-media cognoscenti have gotten themselves all worked up about the NBA’s TV ratings, divining disaster from a few desultory sniffs through the early-season results.
For some, the declines were symptomatic of a greater disorder originating from within the league itself, something egregious enough to effectively drive a fifth of the audience away within the span of a single year.
People really don’t like 3-pointers anymore. Also: Everyone’s too nice. And foreign. And “woke.” That kind of thing.
The hot takes begat takes that were hotter still, until Christmas arrived with a sleigh stuffed with holiday cheer and a reminder of better times. The good ol’ days, when nobody paid any attention to the NBA’s ratings until Boxing Day because why would you.
In the wake of a holiday quintuple-header that drew 84% more viewers than a year ago and gave Disney its strongest Dec. 25 ratings since 2019, the NBA’s TV picture is suddenly looking a lot less Grinched up. Season-to-date, the league’s deliveries are now down 4% compared with the analogous period in 2023, which marks a considerable turnaround from the pre-holiday 21% drop. (ESPN, for its part, is now in the black, up 4% year-over-year.)
Leading the turnaround was the Lakers-Warriors primetime tilt, which averaged 7.76 million viewers on ABC/ESPN. LeBron James and Steph Curry have been lights-out on Christmas Day, and when they square off against each other, big earners for Disney. In 2015, Cavs-Warriors averaged 11.2 million viewers, making it the third most-watched Xmas Day game on record, while the following season saw the two teams draw an audience of 10.1 million—a number the Lakers and Warriors duplicated in 2018.
Aha! What’s that you say? Just nine years ago, the in-their-prime pairing drew far bigger numbers than their mellower, wrinklier present-day counterparts? You mean to tell me that the same year in which 98.2 million U.S. households were subscribed to the legacy pay-TV bundle—roughly 48.4 million more subs than is the case today—the Cavs and Warriors drew 3.4 million more viewers? Per Nielsen, overall TV usage has plummeted 44% since James and Curry decked the halls back in 2015, and the drop versus the comparable period a year ago is holding steady at -8%. Is this what the ‘70s meant by the New Math?
All of which is a roundabout way of saying that context matters, and while the people who actually have skin in the ratings game know what the deliveries are worth, much of the commentariat is more or less clueless.
For example, while this may seem counterintuitive to Extremely Online types who don’t understand the law of supply and demand, NBA sales revenues are up 6% since the season began, good for a gain of $12.2 million versus last year. Don’t look now, but there’s Adam Smith’s invisible hand, and it’s giving you the thumbs down for not understanding how the ad market works.
Speaking of context (if not impolite gestures), one reason nobody ever used to get all squirrelly about pre-Christmas NBA ratings was because the season begins when casual fans are busy consuming other top-tier sports content. Although the NFL has become even more rapacious in recent years, the Shield’s dominance over the culture is not a new thing, and as we saw just a few short weeks ago, a World Series with big names and big markets in play tends to overshadow a nice chunk of October. As such, Christmas has long been the unofficial tipoff of the NBA season; it’s the day when the league makes its first big splash with a national TV audience, thereby setting the stage for the comparative riches of spring.
And spring is when the NBA media partners start to really become vested in their ratings deliveries. As one longtime sales boss/programming exec was fond of saying, there’s no point in racing after Q4 impressions when all the ad revenue lands in Q2. Thus, there’s little sense in getting spooked in the pre-Christmas months; when ad rates are negligible, the cost of doling out any necessary audience deficiency units isn’t exactly going to break the bank. If the NBA’s TV numbers are down 21% in the playoffs, sure, that’s cause for concern. But during what amounts to a two-month Advent calendar term? Your tears are watering down the spilt milk.
Temporal considerations aside, the most important to thing remember about sports ratings—or any ratings, for that matter—is that they almost never concern you. Unless you’re a CMO who’s gravely overestimated the impact of a big one-stop buy, you probably don’t need to get too twitchy whenever you happen to notice that ratings for a particular property are down. If you’re a network exec, you know full well that a decline in available ratings points usually leads to an increase in your average unit cost—that’s supply and demand working their dark magic together—and again, the guarantees in Q4 are never all that high to begin with.
Which leaves the National Basketball Association. I can give you about 75.9 billion reasons why Adam Silver’s crew isn’t indulging in the sort of teeth-gnashing and garment-rending that they get up to in lesser-funded leagues, and all of them are proceeded by a little “S” with a vertical line running down the middle. Such is the assurance that comes with working at the country’s second-biggest pro sports league, where the last five minutes of every game can feel like an eternity, but at least the American Tetherball Association isn’t signing your checks.
Lastly, at least a portion of the NBA’s ratings struggles are probably going to clear up next year when the league’s new rights deal kicks in. With 50 regular-season games set to air on NBC beginning this fall, the NBA will have upwards of 70 over-the-air broadcasts in play next season. While fewer than one-fifth (18.1%) of all U.S. TV homes access OTA programming via an antenna, the big uptick in network coverage is almost certain to help bring the numbers back up, as the direct impact of the shrinking pay-TV universe is reduced.
When compared with this season’s lighter fall deliveries, next year’s broadcast-boosted ratings may usher in a new wave of Nielsen navel gazing, especially in light of the 2024 downturn. Not that such a rebound should necessarily compel anyone who isn’t an advertiser to get all up on their hind legs; after all, if pre-Xmas NBA ratings numbers don’t mean much when they’re down, they shouldn’t take on an overstated significance in the event they go back up again.
In the meantime [glances at imaginary wristwatch], has anyone seen the NHL ratings? Or the college basketball numbers? As in, men’s and women’s? Why is everyone so mad at basketball all of the sudden? Is hockey woke now? Wasn’t gambling supposed to fix everything? Somebody really ought to look into that.
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