The last time the Lakers were eliminated prior to the NBA Finals was 2007, the same year the NBA Finals set an all-time record low in television ratings.
Since the 1998-99 NBA lockout, only once has a non-Lakers NBA Finals averaged at least 9% of U.S. TV homes. That was 1999 (SA/NY: 11.3, NBC), a completely different time by television ratings standards. For most, if not all of the 2000s, the Lakers were the only reliable television draw in the league, the only team casual fans would want to watch.
“I’m taking nothing away from San Antonio,” TNT’s Marv Albert said during the 2004 Lakers/Spurs series, “but from a TV standpoint, no question the Lakers are needed. They are the personality team” (USA Today, 5/4/04). Albert made that statement the same year David Stern joked that his dream NBA Finals would be the “Lakers against the Lakers” (USA Today, 5/10/04).
Albert and Stern were not merely espousing big market bias. One imagines Spurs/Pistons in 2004 would have done about as well as the actual Spurs/Pistons series in 2005 (8.2). Had the Timberwolves played the Pistons that year, there’s no telling how low the numbers could have gone. Fortunately for the league, the Lakers made the Finals that year, and their upset loss to Detroit averaged an 11.5 rating — still the highest since ABC took over NBA rights in 2002.
Today’s NBA is a far cry from the mid-2000s, when the league was arguably at its lowest point since the 1970s. For one, the Lakers are not as big of a draw today as they were during the Shaquille O’Neal/Kobe Bryant era. While last year’s NBA Finals was the third-most viewed of the past 20 years to not involve Jordan’s Bulls, the 2008 and 2009 series both averaged fewer viewers than the Lakers’ drama-free 2002 sweep of the Nets.
More importantly, there are several other marquee teams. The Bulls hail from the nation’s #3 market, and boast league MVP Derrick Rose. The Celtics play in the #7 TV market and are arguably the league’s most storied franchise. The Heat, of course, moved the needle during the regular season like no other team in recent memory, and the media coverage of stars LeBron James, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh was the rising tide that lifted — as David Stern would call it — the ‘oceanliner’ that is the league.
In the West, no team can match the Lakers’ drawing power. However, the remaining teams may not be terrible for ratings. The Mavericks hail from the nation’s #5 market, and their appearance in the 2006 NBA Finals ranks as the second-highest rated non-Laker Finals since the lockout (8.5). The Thunder have one of the bright young stars in the league in Kevin Durant, currently an object of infatuation for the famously fickle sports media — at least until they inevitably turn on him a few years from now. Memphis is the weakest draw of the remaining West teams, but as the unlikely #8 seed, they figure to induce at least a raised eyebrow from a few casual fans. With an opponent like Miami, or to a lesser extent, Chicago or Boston, the Mavericks, Thunder and Grizzlies do not figure to be a drain on the ratings.
Certainly, it will be difficult for any series to match last year’s Lakers/Celtics seven-game thriller. That series averaged a 10.6 rating and over 18 million viewers, massive numbers considering the Finals had averaged fewer than fifteen million viewers in each of the previous five seasons. But in today’s sports landscape, an average rating in the mid-to-high 8.0 range is not bad at all, and there’s no reason to believe that the remaining possibilities — so long as the series are close — will fall short of that mark.
