The Problems With The NBA And How To Fix Them
The National Basketball Association still dominates headlines, but the league has had a ratings crisis that continues to get worse through the past half decade.
All seems okay on the surface. The NBA still is in the middle of the sports talk media throughout the week. Topics ranging from the league’s “G.O.A.T.” to LeBron’s latest tweet still flood debate shows on flagship sports programs. If this is the case, what is the issue? The major media platforms and their personalities are cashing in big from giving their “takes” on these very topics, but even with an ongoing nationally televised discourse of the product, the NBA is still has a massive ratings problem.
Last night concluded one of the best Finals series of the past decade. A devastating injury to Indiana Pacers star Tyrese Haliburton took away from what felt like a potential all-time great game seven, and as a result the intensity felt more or less gone by the middle of the third quarter. From there the Oklahoma City Thunder essentially cruised to the franchise’s first championship. The really unfortunate issue, however, was the fact that the final 18 minutes of the game mirrored the energy that the first six games from the series sparked. An average of less than ten-million Americans tuned into the Finals through the first six games, a 19% decrease in viewership from the Mavericks/Celtics last year.
Market size is often the main talking point when ratings are brought up, and this continues to be the narrative around the coverage of the league. If the Lakers, Warriors, Celtics or Knicks aren’t playing, the media outlets are quick to move on and turn their audience away even when it comes to the championship. With two of the league’s smallest markets competing, this series felt more or less like an after thought even with the level of basketball being played, and that is how ESPN and other major platforms treated it.
It really is a disgrace to see what the NBA media has become. Stephen A. Smith would rather feud with LeBron James, talk about the crime rate in Memphis, and even play solitaire on his phone than watch the Finals of the league he is paid to cover. It is mind boggling to see the segments these shows come up with in the midst of what is supposed to be the biggest moment of the sport.
This is not entirely the fault of big-J journalists and former athletes who make up the sport’s coverage. The league itself is not doing themselves any favors, and the shortsighted decision making from NBA commissioner Adam Silver continues to be on full display.
This starts with the production around the Finals in its totality. A non-NBA fan viewer would notice the “YouTube TV” sponsorship scattered throughout the court than anything relating to the NBA Finals. After game one, Silver and league office’s response to the public outcry was to paste a more or less clipart picture of the Larry O’Brien Trophy and flipping it was a more classic image of “The Finals” in script with another advertisement for Youtube TV at the bottom.
This is a slap in the face to NBA fans looking for production effort, and it relays the post 2020 laziness and lack of critical thinking by Adam Silver and NBA executives. Silver was asked about this by ESPN’s Malika Andrews when he appeared on the set of NBA Countdown last week, his claim was that the traditional designs that used to be pasted on courts during the finals were slippery and an injury risk.
Pictured above is the Boston Celtics’s court design from the 2024 Emirates NBA Cup. So what Silver is telling us is that they have the ability to create designs like this for all 30 teams during an entire month, but when it’s the most significant event of the season, on-court designs are injury risks. No one buys it, and public approval of the commissioner continues to drop exponentially over the past few years.
Silver has made multiple attempts at increasing enthusiasm around the league. The aforementioned Emirates NBA Cup, the play-in tournament that decides the seven and eight spots every season since 2020, and an ever-changing All Star weekend format that seems to become more unpopular every season. Each of these implementations have been received by-in-large negatively, and they ignore the issues with the games themselves.
The NBA Cup in its introductory season last year saw ticket prices of $160 to get in T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas. This past season, those same tickets went for as low as $22.
This can be attributed to multiple reasons, the teams that participated this past year, the Bucks, Hawks, Thunder and Rockets, are all a significant distance from Nevada. Others will (again) point to market size and lack of significant “star” talent in this field. Apparently the league’s reigning MVP, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, and a conservatively top-three player, Giannis Antetokounmpo, is not enough. The truth is the idea behind this event is ignoring the crux of the issues.
A major turnoff for fans has been the power structure of the league being completely backwards with the players holding absolute empowerment over coaches and often franchises. If any disagreement or team-decision makes a star unhappy, they will not hesitate to ask to be moved. In the past decade, there are countless examples of this, and that lack of structure is unattractive for fans who experience constant roster turnover.
Load-management has become a toxic trend that has made the regular season feel meaningless and lacking of effort from players. Starting in the 2023-24 season, the league implemented a minimum 65-games played rule in order for players to be eligible for awards at the end of season, essentially begging stars to not sit out more than a fifth of the season. Even Knicks forward, Mikal Bridges, who is championed for durability, committed a foul after six seconds to keep his streak of 556 games played alive.
Playing 70-80 games per season, something that used to be common in the NBA, has become a complete rarity. Stars have emphasized saving energy for the playoffs, or in cases like Luka Dončić, Zion Williamson, or Joel Embiid, show up out of shape at the beginning of seasons and often sustain soft tissue injuries as a result.
Even beyond player motivational issues, the game of basketball has always been able to sell with the game’s speed and energy, a factor Rob Manfred, commissioner of the MLB, wanted to implement into baseball with the 25-second pitch clock and has since seen a massive ratings boost. This has never been an issue in selling the NBA product until the league’s “foul-baiting” epidemic that has intensified over the years have created stoppages in games that are not necessarily increasing the length of games, but instead are slowing them down and halting momentum.
Player effort, referee leniency, and the national coverage of the league are all far greater issues for the decrease in NBA ratings and enthusiasm than the market size of top teams.
There are positives, however, that point to potential resolutions and boosts starting next year when the new 11-year $76 billion media-rights deal with ESPN/ABC, NBC/Peacock, and Amazon that will increase the amount of games that are nationally-broadcasted. This is a massive opportunity for the league and the national media to right the wrongs in its coverage and production that have spanned over the past half-decade, but there needs to be measures taken with the game itself to improve the product as well.
First of all, there needs to be a philosophical change in the way referees are calling games. The physicality allowed in the playoffs should mirror and be encouraged to what draws a whistle in regular season games. The NBA should have an offseason officiating program where extensive film is studied and evaluated, and this supplemented with pay increases for referees to incentivize this increased commitment to consistency in how games are called.
This effort by the league to increase quality needs to be matched by its players. Whether it is contract clauses, risks of fine or suspension, or a more strict enforcement of rules preventing load management in order to reassert power over players that have undermined their franchises for over a decade now.
Incentivizing players for playing enough games should be adjusted more towards discipline. What other professional league has a tougher time getting its best players to play consistently in the regular seasons? If the players don’t hold up their end of the bargain, Silver and the league office should look into a model of a lowering to 65-70 games instead of 82. Doing away with back-to-backs and instead moving towards two-to-three games a week rather than three-to-four may be the best point of action to allow a greater evaluation depth by the media as well as more time for recovery and game planning for the players and coaches. This would create issues with TV contracts, but are the sort of drastic measures that could be necessary if the ratings free fall continues.
In contrast during the Finals, why must there be a full week in between the conference finals and championship? To drag out a playoff schedule that is already overly dragged out in itself? The best playoff models last around a month, not over two like the NBA’s current format.
There are many issues with every aspect surrounding professional basketball in ways that only ratings can reflect due to the lack of critical coverage around the league. The NBA is at a real breaking point that no one wants to acknowledge, and they are putting themselves at greater longterm risk if critical thinking continues to be lacking at its highest levels.