The NBA ratings debate continues in earnest, and while the genesis is the same culture warring that has been underway since 2020, the discussion has rather quickly become a sounding board for those in and around the league who are dissatisfied with the quality of play. Indeed, this is no longer a conversation about anthem kneeling from half a decade ago, but one about the three-point shot and load management.
Complaints about the game are a common thread throughout sports, and the NBA is faring no worse on that front than Major League Baseball has for years. MLB has in the Rob Manfred era instituted any number of radical reforms to the game, most notably the pitch clock, and was rewarded this past October with the most-watched postseason and World Series in seven years. Job well done.
That, of course, is a severe oversimplification. The World Series pit the Yankees against the Dodgers in arguably the best-possible matchup, and came after an LCS that featured the Mets as well. The prior year Fall Classic was between the Rangers and Diamondbacks and averaged a record-low, despite the same reforms having been in place.
Game quality is a subjective topic. In the NBA, complaints about the three-point shot are a modern-day issue. Go back about 20 years and the complaint was that nobody could shoot. In the days of Pistons 69, Pacers 65 — to decide a trip to the NBA Finals — the offensively-challenged games were deemed ‘unwatchable.’
Those early 2000s complaints came at the tail end of the NBA’s dead ball era, which had actually begun much earlier, during the days of Michael Jordan. It was Jordan’s last NBA Finals — the most-watched in league history — that featured the lowest point total in the history of the event (at the time, it was the lowest in the shot-clock era, even including the regular season) as Utah managed just 54 points in a 42-point blowout loss to Chicago. A 96-54 score in the 2003 Spurs-Nets Finals would have been proof of the NBA’s decline. In 1998, it was just an oddity, and one that more than 25 million viewers tuned in to watch.
That was not unusual for the Bulls, who played a game in the 1997 Eastern Conference Finals that would have been described as setting basketball back decades had it been played by the Pistons and Pacers in 2004. A 75-68 score in the Eastern Conference Finals? Not cause for concern when Jordan and the Bulls were the team with 75.
For a more recent example, the antipathy to the three-point shot is odd to juxtapose with the historic popularity of Caitlin Clark, or even to the persistent appeal of the Warriors’ Stephen Curry — who as much as anybody has popularized the three. The most-watched basketball games this year featured Clark and Curry, with the former’s loss in the NCAA women’s basketball title game averaging nearly 19 million, and the latter’s incredible fourth-quarter flurry in the Olympic men’s basketball final averaging nearly 18 million per Nielsen (and over 20 million including Adobe Analytics) — the most-watched basketball gold medal game since 1996.
The three-point shot still captivates when it its falling, and especially when coming out of the hands of star players with large followings. Yet on those rare occasions when Curry’s shot is not falling, one does not hear the same complaints. Was anyone bemoaning the prevalence of the three when he went 0-9 behind the arc in Game 5 of the 2022 Finals?
So it is that the biggest factor in the game quality debate may be the cast of characters. Remember that sports are television shows. If one cast Ted Danson in a sitcom, it was virtually guaranteed to succeed. If one cast Ted McGinley, not so much (with apologies to McGinley, perhaps unfairly synonymous with the phrase “Jump the Shark”). The Dansons go without saying, whether the Yankees and Dodgers, or Jordan, LeBron James and Curry, or the Chiefs, Cowboys, and Brady-era Patriots.
There are those who argue that the quality of NFL games this season is below par, but that argument has yet to break through because the league’s best teams are also its most popular teams, and the viewership has been trending at a decade-plus high. The Chiefs’ so-so play this season has even made their games more compelling.
Seven years ago, when NFL ratings were the topic of presidential tweets, the argument went that the league was suffering for social activism. Recall that year was riddled with primetime blowouts and resulted in a final four that included quarterbacks Blake Bortles, Case Keenum and Nick Foles (plus Brady). Star players and teams may be the proverbial lipstick on a pig, papering over issues that are blatant in their absence.
If that is true, then the issue for the NBA is starpower — a more realistic reason why viewership has waned (or more accurately, why the NBA is less resilient to the broader decline in television viewing than it was a few years ago). That also relates to the load management issue, which is as much as anything a complaint about the availability of stars.
NBA players are not being held out of games en masse as was the case several years ago. However, as the average age of the league’s stars has increased, so too have the nagging injuries associated with age. That has had a meaningful impact on the ratings.
So far this season, Curry, Joel Embiid, Kawhi Leonard, Giannis Antetokounmpo, Luka Doncic, Kevin Durant and Paul George have each missed at least one national game. (So too have younger stars Victor Wembanyama, Paolo Banchero, Ja Morant and Zion Williamson.) Games with a star player out have averaged 1.29 million viewers this season, 12% lower than all other games (1.47M). More than half of ESPN games have featured at least one star out due to injury.
Is the game quality debate really as simple as just showcasing the most popular teams and stars? One test is coming up next week, when the NBA is set to showcase James and Curry in an unopposed primetime Christmas night window. Simply due to the lack of NFL competition, viewership should be the highest for an NBA regular season game in at least four years (Mavericks-Lakers had just over seven million in the same unopposed primetime window in 2020).
That James and Curry are a borderline lock to end up in the most-watched game of this regular season — assuming they are both healthy to play — points to the core issue. It was apparent to the NBA that, gifted a rare unopposed Christmas Day window in an era of NFL dominance, it should showcase two of the oldest stars in the league. Not the Celtics, not the Thunder, not Anthony Edwards. Some may attribute this to poor marketing (and perhaps there is truth to that), but no matter what is at fault, James and Curry are still the best way to maximize the audience. As they age and are not replaced, there are fewer and fewer stars whose presence can move the ratings needle, and somewhat separately, cover for the game’s flaws.
