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I’m seasoned enough (I refuse to use the word “old” despite how conventionally accurate it might be to apply it to moi) that I remember when the NBA was at such a tipping point of popularity that several of the Finals’ games were shown in late night on a tape delay. This despite the fact that the league had recently absorbed four teams and the best young talent from the ABA, an upstart league that had particular traction with audiences that weren’t watching the network that had those rights at the time, CBS.
At that time, I was part of that elusive younger demographic and indeed had fallen in love with the league, whose best team of its later years, the New York Nets, made plenty of road games readily available on independent station WOR-TV, which had aggressively cornered the market on winter sports teams’ rights as counterprogramming. I grew up a fan of both the Nets and counterprogramming, which CBS programming executives clearly weren’t of either. Besides, those finals fell in the May sweeps period. Why tinker with a crucial cliffhanger episode of THE DUKES OF HAZZARD with the likes of the Washington Bullets and Seattle SuperSonics?
CBS had taken note of the fact that their Sunday afternoon national ratings had declined since the addition of the ABA and were especially frustrated that three of the four teams they added were in markets substantially smaller than the ones they were already in–San Antonio, Denver and Indianapolis. And once the league had forced the Nets to pay the Knicks a fee to share the top market that forced them to cede their top player, “Dr. J.” Julius Erving, they were forced to relocate to New Jersey and became a league doormat playing in a college gymnasium in a town called Piscataway.
Not that the Knicks were dramatically better. Nor were the teams in the next largest markets–Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia. But if one bothered to look at local market ratings in the cities that were competitive–including those ABA upstarts who had their markets to themselves–they actually were doing really well. And cable executives who carried some of those local market telecasts on regional and national “superstations” took note of their impact and popularity. So when national cable networks began to air live weeknight games in the early 80s to augment those superstations they knew they had something pretty decent–let alone a desirable audience profile to boot. Their problem was that cable was still an emerging footprint, so these telecasts’ national impact on a behemoth like CBS was relatively inconsequential. And this was essentially true about just about anything they were doing.
Ted Turner’s prescient head of research recognized this more than almost anyone, with the possible exception of his beleaguered sales team. So he petitioned Nielsen to supply him with a calculation that took his network’s delivery (which at the time included national NBA games) and projected it against the network’s footprint, not the country as a whole, and coined the term “CAR”, or “coverage area rating”. It was a national equivalent to a local market subset, and immediately the otherwise ignorant press began to report that TBS and USA were getting “3 ratings” in primetime, when the truth is they were then far closer to about a 1 or below since cable was barely in a quarter of the country at that point. But perception is reality, so they were considered hits. And when those bigger markets were blessed with generational talent like Magic Johnson, Michael Jordan and a relocated and reignited Dr. J., their ratings went up as well, both on cable and on CBS. CBS saw increases even with their time-shifted telecasts, and then finally moved the finals outside the May sweeps where even the old farts at the top wouldn’t be as concerned. You never heard a word about NBA ratings declines after that.
At least, until recently–which is why I’ve bothered to give you let another lengthy lesson in otherwise irrelevant ratings history. SPORTS MEDIA WATCH’s Jon Lewis dropped a lengthy analysis on the league’s current audience crisis earlier this week where he tried to create some context:
NBA ratings are once again the center of sports media discussion, making it a good time to once again examine the numbers and see exactly where the league currently stands — not just in relation to last year, or more than a decade ago, but to the rest of sports and television.
Through Saturday, NBA games were averaging 1.4 million viewers across ABC, ESPN and TNT — down 19 percent from last year (with NBA TV included, the decline swells to 25 percent).
The NBA’s declines are discussed largely in isolation, creating the popular perception that it is the only league whose viewership is down, the only league whose viewership is down considerably from a decade-plus ago, and that the decline is disastrous. The first two of those claims are demonstrably untrue, and the other unconvincing.
To begin with, it is worth addressing the suggestion that the NBA’s decline is happening in isolation at a time when other leagues are thriving. To be sure, the NFL is thriving. So too is SEC football and Caitlin Clark-fueled women’s basketball. (Major League Baseball had a good year, but that is more akin to the NBA’s strong 2023 postseason, the result of having the highest-profile teams make deep runs.) The broader landscape is closer to what the NBA is experiencing this season. Men’s college basketball is down 21 percent, women’s college games are down 38 percent (owing in part to last year’s Clark boost), and the NHL is down 28 percent.
But this attracted enough attention and was released at a time when the league was on a self-imposed December slowdown amidst their manufactured NBA CUP finals, a four-day junket primarily being attended by executives, sponsors and gamblers in a city still not officially part of their bloated market roster, Las Vegas, and was important enough for commissioner Adam Silver to personally address at length himself, which THE ATHLETIC’s on-site duo of Joe Vardon and Sam Amick obligatorially reported on Tuesday just before the championshiphame of THE NBA CUP (that’s the actual name of the tournament, at least for now) tipped off:
NBA commissioner Adam Silver acknowledged that television ratings for his sport are down this season, but said the dip did not equate to a lack of interest in pro basketball.
“If you look at other data points, in terms of our business, for example, we’ve just come off the last two years of the highest attendance in the history of this league,” Silver said Tuesday in an interview with The Athletic and other national outlets before the NBA Cup championship. “We’re at a point where our social media audience is at the highest of any league and continuing to grow exponentially. So, it’s not a lack of interest in this game.”
“We’re almost at the inflection point where people are watching more programming on streaming than they are in traditional television,” Silver said. “And it’s a reason why for our new television deals, which will enter into next year, every game is going to be available on a streaming service. And as we move to streaming service, putting aside how the actual game is played on the floor, it’s going to allow us from a production standpoint to do all kinds of things that you can’t do through traditional television. All kinds of new functionality, all kinds of new options and screens that are available.”
He’s right on all counts. All of those factors means fans choose to express their passions in more different and siloed ways than ever before. If you’re in the age bracket now where I was when CBS was time-shifting the most crucial games of the year, you are exponentially more likely to not subscribe or even live in a home that subscribes to ABC and especially ESPN and TNT. You’ve likely been weaned on short-form condensed games and TikTok highlights. And based upon what the NBA has shared from their proprietary social media geolocation data, you’re all the more likely to be following these games from somewhere else in the world than North America. Maybe not in prime time, and certainly not where Nielsen’s coverage area exists.
But Amazon does get global data, and so do its competitors. A point driven home, albeit parenthetically, by some details about Netflix’s recent “record-breaking” coverage of the Mike Tyson-Logan Paul battle which, among others, THE NEW YORK POST’s Christian Arnold attempted to cover shortly after that the “verdicts were in” last month:
Streaming giant Netflix said that 108 million people worldwide watched last Friday’s bout between Mike Tyson and Jake Paul, calling it the “most-streamed global sporting event ever” in a post on social media.
The claim comes despite highly publicized issues with the stream during the fight on Friday and just days after the streamer claimed that 60 million of its member households across the globe had tuned in for the fight.
The data of the 108 million figure came from figures from analytics company TVision, which tabulated the U.S. Viewing numbers, and Netflix first-party data, The Hollywood Reporter reported.
And as MINISTRY OF SPORTS added:
The event peaked at 65 million concurrent streams, underscoring the platform’s capacity to handle large-scale live sports events.
No, it’s not Nielsen and no, that doesn’t necessarily mean any of them were watching in the way audiences are traditionally measured–a point THE ANKLER’s prickly ENTERTAINMENT STRATEGY GUY once again took umbrage with in a story he dropped yesterday:
Whenever I see a new data source, my first question is: what can I compare this to? A data point with no context provides no information.
To illustrate this, suppose you go to your doctor. He takes a blood test. He comes back and tells you your score is a 15. The obvious question you have: What does a 15 mean? If the normal human measures a 2, then a 15 sounds really bad! Now, for a medical test, with millions of data points, doctors can tell you what is normal, above average or below average. That’s the context!
What does 108 million global viewers according to TVision mean? What about 60 million households? Without context—meaning additional data point—we don’t know, and that should limit the sweeping conclusions we draw.
But two conclusions I feel safe in drawing is that a substantial percentage of viewing being measured somewhere is coming from outside the U.S., and that I’d be a little concerned about ol’ ESG’s next blood test if he keeps reiterating the same point so vehemently.
This could be a wonderful opportunity for the NBA to insist that Amazon lean on Nielsen–or a competitor, gak, even TVision!– in a similar manner that they did to appease the NFL nay-sayers that their Thursday Night Football audiences weren’t as up to snuff as perception might have been conveying. Nielsen has platforms in many countries where Amazon’s footprint currently extends, a point that should be all the more significant with the NBA. Augment them the same way they are–at Nielsen’s behest!–doing with TNF. Start as soon as next season’s WNBA schedule kicks in because they’re among the few outliers that are actually showing positive trajectory. Demonstrate conclusively that that growth could even be higher–and give Silver something more concrete to offer than correlative and inferential data to reference the next time the press and the league conveys at an event that seems to matter to players.
No, that won’t be this year’s All-Star Game. More like the NBA finals. Now exclusively in June, because even now, no broadcast network wants to overly disrupt the May sweeps.
Until next time…