For the last two months, the sports-media cognoscenti have gotten themselves all worked up about the NBA’s TV ratings, divining crisis from a few haphazard coughs through the early-season benefits.
For some, the declines were symptomatic of a bigger problem that came from within the group itself, anything so outrageous that it essentially drove a second of the market away in a year. Folks really don’t like 3-pointers again. Furthermore: Everyone’s very good. And unusual. And “woke”. That kind of item. Up until Christmas, when a sleigh mixed with holiday cheer and a warning of better days, the popular takes produced hot takes that were hotter also. Why did you wait until Boxing Day before anyone else paid any attention to the NBA’s rankings? The NBA’s Television image is immediately looking much less giddy in the midst of a vacation quintuple-header that attracted 84 % more people than a year ago and gave Disney its strongest Dec. 25 rankings since then. Season-to-date, the league’s deliveries are now down 4 % compared with the analogous period in 2023, which marks a considerable turnaround from the pre-holiday 21 % drop. ( ESPN, for its part, is now in the black, up 4 % year-over-year. ) Leading the return was the Lakers-Warriors nighttime wobble, which averaged 7.76 million people on ABC/ESPN. Steph Curry and LeBron James have been giddy up on Christmas Day, and Disney is huge money when they round off against one another. In 2015, Cavs-Warriors averaged 11.2 million people, making it the next most-watched Xmas Day match on report, while the following year saw the two groups draw an audience of 10.1 million —a range the Lakers and Warriors duplicated in 2018. Aha! What’s that you say? Only nine years ago, the in-their-prime combination drew far bigger figures than their gentler, wrinklier present-day rivals? You mean to tell me that the Cavs and Soldiers attracted 3.4 million more people the same year that 98.2 million U.S. families subscribed to the reputation pay-TV bundle, or 48.4 million more than is currently the case? According to Nielsen, overall TV usage has decreased by 44 % since James and Curry decked the halls in 2015, and it is still down from the same period last year, which is 8 %. Is this what the New Math was used to mean in the 1970s? All of which is a circular way to say that environment issues, and while the people who actually have skin in the rankings game are aware of how much the comments are made, the majority of the commentariat is more or less incompetent. For instance, NBA sales revenues have increased by 6 % since the season began, which is good for a gain of$ 12.2 million compared to last year, even though this may seem counterintuitive to those who don’t understand the law of supply and demand. Don’t look now, but there’s Adam Smith’s invisible hands, and it’s giving you the hands down for no understanding how the advertisement industry works. One reason anyone ever used to find all squirky about pre-Christmas NBA ratings was because the period begins when relaxed fans are active consuming other top-tier sports information, if not inappropriate gestures. Even though the NFL has gotten even more rapacious in recent years, the Shield’s dominance over the culture is not new, and a World Series with big names and big markets in play has a tendency to overshadow a good chunk of October. Since Christmas has always been the NBA season’s unofficial start, the day the league makes its first big splash on television and sets the tone for the comparative riches of spring. And this is the time of year when the NBA media partners start to truly become invested in their ratings. There’s no point racing after Q4 impressions when all the ad revenue arrives in Q2, as one longtime sales boss/exec once said. Thus, there’s little sense in getting spooked in the pre-Christmas months, when ad rates are negligible, the cost of doling out any necessary audience deficiency units isn’t exactly going to break the bank. If the NBA’s TV numbers are down 21 % in the playoffs, sure, that’s cause for concern. However, when does it actually count as a two-month Advent calendar term? The spilt milk is dripping down on your tears. Temporal considerations aside, the most important to thing remember about sports ratings —or any ratings, for that matter—is that they almost never concern you. You probably don’t need to get too jitchy whenever you happen to notice that the ratings for a particular property are down, unless you’re a CMO who has gravely overestimated the impact of a big one-stop buy. If you work in network engineering, you are aware that a decline in available ratings points typically results in a rise in your average unit cost. Again, the guarantees in Q4 are never that high to begin with. Which leaves the National Basketball Association. I can give you about 75.9 billion reasons why Adam Silver’s crew isn’t indulging in the sort of teeth-gnashing and garment-rending that they get up to in lesser-funded leagues, and all of them are proceeded by a little” S” with a vertical line running down the middle. The American Tetherball Association isn’t signing your checks, which is the assurance that comes with working in the country’s second-biggest professional sports league, where the final five minutes of every game can feel like an eternity. Finally, when the NBA’s new rights deal comes into effect, at least a portion of its ratings problems will probably resolve itself over the coming year. With 50 regular-season games set to air on NBC beginning this fall, the NBA will have upwards of 70 over-the-air broadcasts in play next season. The big increase in network coverage is almost certain to help bring the numbers back up, as the direct impact of the shrinking pay-TV universe is reduced, even though less than one-fifth ( 18.1 % ) of all U.S. TV homes access OTA programming via an antenna. When compared with this season’s lighter fall deliveries, next year’s broadcast-boosted ratings may usher in a new wave of Nielsen navel gazing, especially in light of the 2024 downturn. After all, if pre-Xmas NBA ratings don’t mean much when they’re down, they shouldn’t assume an overstated significance in the event that they rebound again. This shouldn’t necessarily compel anyone who isn’t an advertiser to get all up on their hind legs. In the meantime]glances at imaginary wristwatch], has anyone seen the NHL ratings? Or the college basketball numbers? As in, men’s and women’s? Why is everyone suddenly so obsessed with basketball? Is hockey woke now? Wasn’t gambling supposed to fix everything? Someone ought to take that into account.