While the coverage might make one believe that the NBA suffered a sharper ratings drop than any other league, the numbers tell a different story.
The 2020 NBA Playoffs averaged 3.04 million viewers across ESPN, ABC, TNT and NBA TV (83 telecasts), down 37% from last year, when the postseason took place as scheduled in April, May and June (4.83M).
The 37 percent decline is in line with the broader trend facing the sports industry since the wave of cancellations and postponements in March. The NHL Stanley Cup Playoffs declined an almost identical 38% across NBC’s TV and digital platforms (from 1.53M to 953K) and the MLB Division Series sank 40% on TBS, FS1 and MLB Network (from 3.04M to 1.82M).
The six-game Lakers-Heat NBA Finals averaged 7.49 million viewers, down 49% from last year and easily the least-watched Finals on record. The previous low was 9.29 million for Spurs-Cavaliers in 2007. [Related: NBA Finals ratings improve, but still low, at series end.]
Like the playoffs as a whole, the steep drop for the Finals is in line with the industry-wide trend. Even after losing half of its year-ago audience, the Finals held up better than the Stanley Cup Final (-61%) or the final round of golf’s U.S. Open (-56%), which were similarly shifted from June to late summer.
The NBA Playoffs was originally scheduled to run from April 18 to as late as June 21. Due to the league’s four-month suspension of play that began March 11, the postseason instead ran from August 17 to October 11 — overlapping with NFL season for the majority of that time.
In addition to airing at a different time of year, the playoffs included a number of rare weekday afternoon starts. A total of 29 weekday games began prior to 7 PM ET, compared to none last year. Of those, 13 began prior to 6 PM. Before this season, no weekday playoff game had begun prior to six since 1991.
Viewership for the NBA restart was never able to compare a more typical regular season or playoffs. The “seeding round” games that concluded the regular season averaged 1.28 million viewers, down 21% from the league’s pre-hiatus average. Yet the NBA’s diminished numbers still outpaced the competition; ESPN’s seeding game average (1.20M) beat its MLB regular season average by 71% (749K).
During the playoffs, the NBA delivered television’s highest rating in adults 18-49 on 30 of 41 nights. The final two games of the NBA Finals each had a 3.2 rating in the demo — well below last year’s comparable games, but TV’s best (non-NFL) rating in the demo since February’s Academy Awards.
The NBA’s decline has generated greater media attention than those of other sports because of the perception that the league is being punished by viewers for its support of the Black Lives Matter movement. The data does not indicate any meaningful shift in the racial make-up of the league’s audience. Through the first four games of the NBA Finals, white viewers made up 45 percent of the audience. That compares to 46 percent last year.
The decline in sports ratings comes amidst a broader decline in television viewing overall; an average of 76.2 million viewers were watching primetime television on the first five nights of the Finals, nearly eight million fewer than during last year’s Finals (83.8M).
Cable news viewing has taken up a greater portion of that diminished audience. Viewership on the “big three” cable news networks was 78% higher on the first five nights of the Finals than during last year’s series, rising from 3.8 to 8.4 million viewers combined.
Sports viewing trend
[Numbers from Nielsen, NBA Finals avg. from LA Times 10.13]
