Mainstream Media Finally Agrees With OutKick: The NBA Ratings Cannot Be Defended

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Four years ago, the NBA fanboys in the media denounced anyone who cited the league’s ratings declines as racist, bad-faith, and dishonest. ESPN commentators Stan Verrett, Mark Jones, and J.A. Adande were particularly irked by OutKick’s coverage of the ratings. By coverage, we mean citing the public data that showed how ESPN was losing viewers at a rate that outpaced the standard decline in television.

Four years later, the NBA has declined to such a degree that even the friendliest of the media allies can no longer defend the state of the league. 

Specifically, the NBA viewership is down 48% since 2012 and 28% on ESPN year-over-year. The new in-season tournament is already down double digits from its inaugural season a year ago, and four of the five lowest-rated NBA Finals of the past 30 years have occurred in the past four years.

Thereby, the decline of the NBA morphed into an industry-wide topic in December.

ESPN’s highest-rated daily talk show, “PTI,” opened on Wednesday with a discussion about the NBA’s lost popularity. During the segment, acclaimed NBA analyst Michael Wilbon admitted he was “worried” and “didn’t know how the NBA could fix it.”

The New York Times, which had previously argued that the NBA could one day surpass it, opened its NBA “lookahead” preview series with the question: “How does the league fix its TV ratings?”

The Times could not find a readily available solution.

Nor could CNBC, which this week declared that “Perhaps the biggest story in sports media right now is why NBA ratings are way down this season.” CNBC gave the NBA a “failing” grade.

There is no bigger advocate of the NBA than Hall of Famer Magic Johnson. Yet even he acknowledged the decline during an appearance on FS1 on Tuesday, blaming the lost interest on modern players yukking it up together.

“They don’t hate each other. I hated Larry [Bird] and every Celtic. I really don’t like you [Paul Pierce] but you, my little brother. Now I love you because you’re out of that green and white,” Magic argued.

Sounds like a stretch. Though if Magic can’t defend the NBA product, the league ought to reevaluate.

Radio hosts Colin Cowherd and Dan Patrick have made it a priority to stay out of the culture war of sports. And because of the NBA’s support for BLM in 2020, as in the Marxist fundraising organization, criticism of the NBA is inherently a divisive topic. Yet even Cowherd and Patrick opined about the falling NBA viewership this week.

“The NBA ratings are down 48% in the last 12 years and they have fallen off a cliff this year,” Cowherd said. “Adam Silver’s solution is to make the courts brighter. “It is a really bad look for a family of four to go to a game and the [stars] don’t play

“Go ask the Democrats. Be warned, once you detach from regular people in America, you will pay a price,” he concluded.

Read more about Cowherd’s astute analogy of the NBA and the Democratic Party here. Meanwhile, Patrick likened the state of the NBA to late-night television, another industry in serious decline:

“It feels like this is late-night TV. It used to be you’d stay up and watch Carson, Letterman, Leno. Now you just get a clip that you see the next day. That feels like what the NBA is becoming, just a viral clip that you’ll see the next day. You may not stay up and watch games.”

Like late-night, the NBA is no longer appointment television. The stars don’t even bother to play in a quarter of the games, citing “load management.

Even the NBA’s own coaches have discussed the viewership erosion. 

“I would rather watch something else,” Boston Celtics head coach Joe Mazzulla told reporters this week. “I don’t watch NBA games. So I’m just as much the problem as anyone else is. I don’t like watching the games.”

Lakers coach JJ Redick also acknowledged the crummy ratings on Wednesday, blaming the media for telling fans the product is diminished. 

“I don’t think we … have done a good job of storytelling, of celebrating the game,” Redick said when asked about the declines. “If I’m a casual fan and you tell me every time I turn on the television that the product sucks, well, I’m not going to watch the product. And that’s really what has happened over the last 10 to 15 years. I don’t know why. It’s not funny to me.”

The Wrap, which rarely offers a profound opinion, also raised concerns earlier this month about the league’s future. 

“While it’s only been a month, the rating dip may well not be a blip. The NBA’s ratings have been heading in the wrong direction for several years now. And the drop-off is even more severe than that, considering Nielsen started including out-of-home viewership from places like sports bars in its ratings in 2020. In other words, the ratings are beefed up compared to a decade ago — and the NBA still can’t match its past performance.”

What does the NBA have to say now that its minions are no longer spinning the narrative positively? On Monday, NBA commissioner Adam Silver blamed the drop on changing viewership habits. 

“We’re almost at the inflection point where people are watching more programming on streaming than they are in traditional television,” Silver told the New York Times. 

“And it is  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.”

Not exactly.

The NFL is averaging 17.3 million viewers this season, its highest average since 2015. This past World Series was the highest-rated since 2017. The ratings for college football, UFC, golf, and boxing are each up substantially compared to 2023.

In terms of mainstream sports, there is only one professional sports league that disrupts the trend: the NBA. (Niche sports like the NHL are also down year over year.)

The NBA’s problems are larger than “cord-cutting” – much larger.

The list of issues is lengthy. The league is too political, the regular season hardly matters, players don’t take games seriously, small market teams struggle to compete, star power is lacking, and games feel more like 3-point shooting contests than actual basketball games.

Further, the NBA’s biggest draw remains LeBron James. He turns 40 next week.  Even Bomani Jones, who previously defended the NBA against its rating declines, admitted that as LeBron and Steph Curry approach the later years of their careers, the league’s troubles may worsen.

“What’s next for the NBA when LeBron and Steph retire?” he asked, struggling to find the answer.

The NBA has not found a face of the league for the next decade. The NBA lacks a Caitlin Clark, Patrick Mahomes, Josh Allen, or Shohei Ohtani. Perhaps Anthony Edwards is that guy. If not, Silver best hope some American-born high schooner is the next Michael Jordan. 

Sure, the NBA is financially well-positioned. Next season, the first year of the league’s new 11-year, $76 billion broadcast agreement with Amazon, Disney, and NBC begins. However, tensions between the NBA and its partners could soon arise. 

According to the Wall Street Journal, there are already “executives inside NBCUniversal” who believe the company paid too much ($2.5 billion a year) for its upcoming NBA package.

Undoubtedly, some Disney and Amazon executives are also shaking their heads. The biggest winner of the NBA’s latest rights negotiations might be Netflix, which passed on the NBA and then signed an agreement with the WWE. While scripted, WWE is cheaper to air and currently more popular than the NBA.

There are not many topics on which the mainstream media agrees with OutKick. However, the NBA’s decline has us in agreement. Finally.