In the wake of Game 1 of the NBA Finals drawing a record-low overnight rating, the question becomes — what happened?
The hype prior to the game was at a level the NBA Finals have not seen since the Lakers were involved. LeBron James was being talked about as if he were the new Michael Jordan. And while the Cavaliers got blown out, the last outcome anyone expected was that people would not even tune in to watch him try to overcome the three-time champion Spurs. A terrible rating makes sense for Game 2, or Games 3 and 4. But for Game 1? When the series is tied at 0 and has not even started yet?
What accounts for the terrible number?
Are the San Antonio Spurs so much of a bore to watch that the casual fan will not bother even watching LeBron play against them? That is a possibility; the Spurs have played ugly basketball in three NBA Finals in the past decade — maybe casual fans are simply tired of 80-70 final scores and players who have about as much charisma as Joe Lieberman.
But the opponent of the Spurs is a team that one would imagine would attract a large audience. Despite being arguably the most feeble team in the history of the NBA to make the Finals, and despite their play last night — that undoubtedly made most NBA fans wonder exactly what was wrong with the Detroit Pistons — the Cleveland Cavaliers feature LeBron James, a heavily packaged, mainstream superstar who has, on occasion, lived up to the hype. At 22 years old, James is in more commercials than all of the Spurs combined and is coming off of a transcendent performance against the Pistons. Why are fans less interested in watching the Spurs take on the league’s next superstar than they were watching the Spurs take on the Detroit Pistons?
Maybe its the NBA. After all, it is the league people love to hate for so many reasons; outside of the young, male ‘urban’ demographic, love of the NBA is usually regarded with a put-down joke or outright disdain. That being said, the people who hate the NBA certainly were not tuning in last season or the year before that, so the fact that they are not watching this year should not have any effect on the ratings.
Maybe NBA fans are simply sick and tired of the league. Many NBA fans dislike the San Antonio Spurs, partly due to tactics perceived as bush-league that helped them defeat the Phoenix Suns in the second round. But most NBA fans hated the Lakers in their heyday as well, and still tuned in to watch the Finals.
Or, maybe its the television networks. Several networks have been recording horrible numbers over the past several weeks; NBC set a prime-time record low when the net averaged 4.8 million viewers last week, and audiences (even for the juggernaut American Idol) are down across the board. But even with the small audiences, the NBA showed that it could draw big ratings as recently as Saturday night, when 7.4 million viewers watched the Cavaliers drop Detroit on TNT. The thought was that the big number for that game would carry into the Finals. It has not.
No matter what the reason, the NBA has suddenly been set back to the year 2003. The 2003 Finals, it was widely believed, would never be topped — or bottomed, that is. That series averaged a 6.5 rating, and was known more for the terrible basketball than anything else. Even the 2005 Finals, which was good in the way that eating vegetables is good for a child, drew a higher rating — and no game from that seven game series drew an overnight lower than 8.0. How could a series involving arguably the league’s biggest star, coming off of his most memorable performance, suddenly be on par with the Spurs and the Nets? Playoff ratings were down, but for Game 1 to set a record low is simply unfathomable.
