The ‘Things NBA fans get themselves worked up about’ category got a new entry this month, and it reached a fever pitch over the Christmas Day slate of games —ratings. Specifically, broadcast ratings.
It’s a subject Commissioner Adam Silver is often asked about in his pressers, especially those that precede the NBA’s tent-pole events like the In-Season Tournament, All-Star Weekend, the Finals, and Summer League. It also comes up around the annual Board of Governors meeting in early September. It makes sense for Silver to talk about it, given that he’s the league Commissioner, and because he’s been at the helm for broadcast contract negotiations and renegotiations. If this is all making your eyes cross, good, that helps to prove my point.
Silver, team owners, and broadcast executives are the only people who should care about the NBA’s broadcast ratings. It’s their job. Whether numbers are up or down should be of no concern to fans, casual or die-hard, because they ultimately have no bearing on the viewing experience, nor is it up to fans to “fix” anything.
Traditionally, this would’ve been self-evident, but in the contemporary era of fandom — especially NBA fandom — there’s a desire to critique and cosplay as team or league executives. Everything from down to the decimal point salary analysis in trade machinations, on-court performance and ways to improve athlete “production”, concerns for whether front offices are over-spending (they’re billionaires, they can afford it), and now, worries over marketing of the league.
Broadcast ratings are just one metric. The decline in “traditional” television ratings has more to do with how younger fans find and interact with basketball than with some phantom threat of malaise or disinterest. Cable is expensive, and younger audiences almost exclusively stream their sports. Case in point ESPN’s announcement on Christmas Day of an 84% spike in viewership, a day when many, many people head to their family home and have cable television to watch and plenty of free time on their hands.
As someone who is interested in the underlying mechanics of the league, from its business interests to budding trends that will inevitably impact the game at a granular level, I understand the impulse to root out cause and effect. I also understand the line between inquiry and reading too deeply into something, too prematurely.
For all the shifting rhetoric around sports, like media that dissects each and every element and the rise of fantasy micro-managing within fandom, it’s a traditional outlet. That is, the main parameters resist change because people don’t want it to. There’s comfort in sports as a known entity.
Basketball and the NBA is in a good place, but at the moment it’s a place of flux. Mechanics are changing, competitive parity is rising, talent is being drawn into the league from all over the world given the rise of the game’s draw and footprint. These are all positive things, but things that can cause confusion because ultimately, they cause change.
