NBA Ratings Continue To Tank Hard, Down 28% on ESPN
The NBA ratings have continued to tank through the first month of the 2024-25 season. Viewership for NBA games on ESPN, its lead broadcast partner, is down 28% year over year.
The league was already coming off a disappointing season in which its playoff viewership decreased by over 12%.
So, commissioner Adam Silver's excuse this week that the ratings drop is a byproduct of the "election and World Series" does not suffice. The NBA has been consistently losing viewers for nearly a decade. As a whole, the NBA has lost around 45% of its viewership since 2012.
The declines are not new. They are just getting worse.
Basketball Hall of Famer Shaquille O’Neal blames the fall on too much 3-point shooting. "I have a theory that [the ratings] are down because … everybody’s running the same plays," O’Neal said this week on his podcast. "I don’t mind Golden State back in the day shooting threes, but every team is not a three-point shooter."
OutKick founder Clay Travis blames the league's politics, calling the NBA "the original Bud Light."
"The most consequential consumer boycott of the 21st century didn't come from drinker's rejection of a beer, it came from sports, in particular the NBA, which has destroyed its brand with a large percentage of the American sporting public by embracing woke, political, far-left-wing messaging in its games," Clay wrote.
"So why haven't you heard about this despite the overwhelming data I'm about to lay out for you? It's simple, the American sports media is so far-left wing they have refused to share the data right in front of their eyes. The American sports media overwhelmingly supports far-left-wing political messaging, they love it because it reflects their own ideals. The vast majority of the sports media wants sports to be filled with left-wing politics - they see it as an affirmation of their own personal beliefs and applaud it."
Others blame players for taking games off, in the name of "load management." Others cite "LeBron fatigue" and the league's failure to establish new stars. Gilbert Arenas, who has an obvious issue with white people, attributes the NBA's ratings crash to the number of white European players staring across the league. Fans at local bars might blame the minimal number of teams that can actually compete for a champion on an annual basis.
They are right—all of them. (Well, except for Gilbert Arenas.)
The league is too political, the regular season doesn't matter, players don't take games seriously, small market teams struggle to compete, star power is lacking, players lose MVPs because they are white (thanks to Kendrick Perkins), and the product is boring.
What about cord-cutting? Nope.
Cord-cutting affects the NFL just as much. So far this season, the NFL has averaged 17.3 million viewers, its highest average since 2015. This past World Series was the highest-rated since 2017. College football is surging. So is the UFC. Over 108 million live global viewers tuned in last Friday to watch Mike Tyson fight Jake Paul. Even the WNBA Finals set an ESPN record in viewership this fall.
Sports are more popular than ever. The NBA is the outlier.
NBA fanboys will counter and cite the league's new $77 billion rights deal with Disney, NBC and Amazon. It's true that the NBA cashed in on its rights negotiations, but that doesn't mean the partners didn't vastly overpay.
Based on the ratings trends, they did.
In fact, according to the Wall Street Journal, there are already "executives inside NBCUniversal" who believe the company paid too much ($2.5 billion a year) for a product in decline.
In 2017, ESPN pundits like Stephen A. Smith, Bomani Jones and Jalen Rose predicted that the NBA would surpass the NFL within a decade. Instead, the NBA has fallen closer to the NHL in terms of popularity than it has closed the gap on the NFL.
No offense, hockey fans. The NHL is a niche sport. And so is the NBA.