Much has been written about NBA ratings the past few years, but where does the league truly stand?
The 2022-23 NBA regular season averaged 1.59 million viewers across ABC, ESPN and TNT, down slightly in viewership from last season (1.61M). Contextualizing those numbers is a choose-your-own adventure game.
If one is looking for the most unflattering interpretation, this season ranks among the least-watched of the past 30 years — ahead of the two COVID-shortened seasons of 2019-20 (1.55M) and 2020-21 (1.36M) and two years of the league’s mid-2000s lull (2002-03: 1.58M; 2006-07 1.52M). That the past four seasons rank among the six least-watched, even with the addition of out-of-home viewing to Nielsen’s estimates, cannot be brushed aside.
Even so, it is also true that the NBA’s audience has been remarkably durable over the past two decades. Even with the out-of-home caveat, there are few properties that could average more viewers in 2023 than in 2003, especially considering that nearly 40 million fewer viewers were watching primetime television this season than 20 years ago (2002-03: 102.9M; 2022-23: 63.8M).
The NBA viewership timeline
When trying to make an argument that NBA viewing is not just down, but actively tanking, the common comparison is to the Michael Jordan era. Understandably so, as viewership is down close to half from the Jordan-era peak in the 1995-96 season (2.99M). Yet nearly all of the league’s drop-off in viewership post-Jordan happened more than two decades ago.
The post-Jordan slide
It is somewhat ironic that the the most-watched NBA regular season of the past 30 years was the 1998-99 lockout campaign, a low-scoring 50-game slog that began in February and did not include the recently-retired Jordan. Games on NBC, TNT and TBS averaged 3.1 million viewers that year. (There is an easy explanation for this; NBC games no doubt made up a larger portion of the league’s reduced sample size that year.)
The dropoff began immediately afterward in 1999-2000, when viewership fell by a third to 2.1 million, and remained in that range through the rest of the NBC era. When the NBA swapped NBC and TBS for ABC and ESPN in the 2002-03 season, viewership suffered another sharp drop, declining 23% from 2.06 million in 2001-02 to 1.58 million. No wonder David Stern was so sensitive to Rudy Martzke’s criticism of the deal in USA Today. Viewership has stayed around that level ever since, with some notable exceptions.
Over the 20-plus years of the current rights deal, NBA viewership has ranged within a narrow band of 1.5 to 1.9 million viewers, with the exception of five seasons. One was the 2020-21 COVID-shortened season, a mostly-fanless 72-game campaign in which viewership bottomed out at fewer than 1.4 million. The others came in a four-year stretch when viewership reached Jordan-era levels.
The “Heatles” era
By the time LeBron James joined the Miami Heat in 2010, attention to his free agency had reached critical mass. “The Decision” — the nearly 13-year-old TV special that made James the most polarizing athlete in America to this very day — averaged nearly ten million viewers, and in mid-July no less.
That massive interest carried into the NBA season. Viewership jumped 35% from 1.85 million in 2009-10 to 2.51 million in the 2010-11 and 2011-12 seasons, nearly matching Jordan’s final two years with the Bulls (1996-97: 2.62M; 1997-98: 2.64M) despite far fewer games airing on broadcast television.
Even when viewership dipped in James’ final two seasons in Miami, the numbers remained well above the pre-“Decision” average. The 2012-13 season averaged 2.17 million and 2013-14 pulled 1.95 million, figures that remain unmatched in any subsequent season.
There are ultimately nine seasons of the past 30 in which NBA viewership was disproportionately strong — the 1994-95 to 1998-99 seasons, which spanned Jordan’s second run with the Bulls, and James’ time in Miami from 2010-11 to 2013-14. It is no coincidence that most comparisons of NBA viewership are to these two particular eras, as comparisons to other seasons are less dramatic.
For example, viewership in the 2022-23 season declined less than a third (-31%) from 1993-94 (2.29M). Even with the out-of-home caveat, that kind of proximity to 30 years ago — a year in which “Murder She Wrote” ranked among the highest rated primetime shows — is rare in modern television.
NBA viewership in context
The NBA versus the rest of television
It is the case that the rest of television is usually excluded from most discussion of the NBA’s recent ratings slump. NBA viewership may be down by about half from its Jordan-era peak, but the number of viewers watching primetime television is down nearly half from just a decade ago — dropping from 112.9 million during the 2012-13 season to just 63.8 million in the most recent campaign.
Even compared to just five years ago, the drop in primetime viewing is stark — a 35% decline from the 2017-18 season (98.6M). That more-than-doubles the decline in NBA viewership over that span (-16%).
The result of that plunge in primetime viewing is that the NBA’s diminished audience still accounts for a greater and greater share of the audience. NBA games averaged a 3% share during the 2022-23 season, the highest of the past 20 years. It is worth noting that the share is a consolation prize at best; few cited the figure prior to the recent collapse in TV viewing. Nonetheless, the share does indicate that the NBA, and live sports in general, has been largely resilient to the shrinking linear television landscape.
The NBA versus other sports leagues
As far as unflattering comparisons go, the NBA seems to be the most popular control group. When Iowa-Louisville in the NCAA women’s basketball Elite Eight averaged more viewers than any NBA game on ESPN during the regular season, the statistic went viral on social media. Some of this is no doubt a response to the once-common — and flatly unrealistic — claims that the NBA was chasing down the NFL. In that context, such comparisons might simply provide a dose of necessary humility.
Nevertheless, it is worth noting that the NBA continues to outpace its actual competition, which is most assuredly not pro or college football. Major League Baseball games averaged 936,000 viewers across its national partners in 2022 and 760,000 the year before. The NHL regular season is averaging 470,000 this season, up from last year (444K). Men’s college basketball regular season games averaged 371,000 across all networks during 2022-23, compared to 363,000 the year before.
If the perception is that the NBA’s audience is shrinking at a time when other properties are growing, there is certainly some evidence for the claim. If the perception is that the NBA is losing these head-to-head comparisons, that is another story — at least if one is comparing apples to apples.
Conclusions
The point of this examination is not to argue that the NBA is in a particularly strong position right now. It is hard to imagine that the league wants to be in the same viewership range it was in 20 years ago, when perceptions surrounding the game were perhaps even more negative than they are today, especially given the contribution from out-of-home viewing that did not exist back then. With that said, the NBA’s current viewership situation is frankly par for the course for the league in the post-Jordan era and to no small extent unavoidable given the decline in television viewing.
It may be cold comfort that the league has been in far worse situations before — the 16% decline from 2017-18 to the current season pales in comparison to the 49% plunge from 1998-99 to 2002-03 or even the 26% drop from the 2001-02 to 2006-07 — but that does not make it any less true. It is not exactly saying much that the league is outdrawing baseball, hockey and college basketball, but again that does not make it any less true.
The reality is that the league’s downturn is both real and exaggerated. The NBA may not be faring as well as five, ten or certainly 25 years ago, but it is faring far better than what seems to be the popular perception.
