The NBA-NFL divide is a perfect allegory for the country as a whole. The NBA is cool, it’s hip, it’s the future, it’s WAY bigger on social media, and it’s getting absolutely crushed by the NFL. The NBA may be mostly black players but it’s the sport of my people and Twitter’s population - social science college graduates. The league will eventually learn that catering SO heavily to this small population at the expense of the wider public is terrible business, but for now the NBA just gets think-pieces from people like me on how it’s the future of sports and entertainment while its ratings tank and the NFL - the “boomer league” - just keeps printing money.
You could make a good argument about the relative importance of each regular season game for the NBA vs NFL and come to some valid conclusions about why opening day ratings aren't a fair comparison.
And you could maybe make the point that the NFL, like baseball, has ratings carried by old people who aren't NBA fans. And advertisers (the ones paying for the massive TV contracts which fuel the leagues) don't care about old people.
Cool. So what if we look at the Super Bowl vs NBA Finals? And only for the key demo (18-49 year olds). Yeah, the Super Bowl is more of an event itself that appeals beyond the sports fan... but it should be close, right?
In 2021, the Super Bowl nabbed 34.3 million viewers in the key demo. Which is a huge decline from a decade ago when it was routinely in the 50 million range.
The 2021 NBA Finals? The clinching game 6 brought in a peak of 16.6 million TOTAL viewers.
Ouch.
The NBA is harder to watch in ways that the ratings folks count. The regional sports networks that show most local games require expensive and archaic cable packages in most markets. The "national" games are still largely on cable tv. I'd love to know what percentage of fans illegally stream games. But regardless, that has to lead to lesser interest by the time we hit the later rounds of the playoffs. At least to some degree.
Still I'll agree the embrace of spectacle over sport (I'm taking "twitterization" to be a metaphor for that) has to be at least a decent share of the issue.
Fans, especially more conservative white fans who make up close to half the country and an even greater share of the TV audience, get fairly stereotyped for complaining about aesthetics or distractions from the game. Too much complaining, too much showboating, too much flopping, too much traveling (never try to explain the two step rule to the 63 year old guy behind you who is wearing a football jersey to an NBA game and is four $11 beers into the night).
I don't want to try and guess what amount of that is code for people not liking the antics of African American athletes. I'm sure it's a big number. But still, the NFL put a stop to elaborate endzone dances. Offsides and false start penalties limit how much time a player can spend complaining about a call. And a travel just seems to get way more negative energy than a holding call that is missed. Point being, out of structure of the game and intentional changes - the NFL shuts down a lot of the stuff the angry old drunk guy behind you might complain about.
The NBA? They turn it into youtube clips. They've gotten way better about policing flopping and excessive fighting with refs. But people still see James Harden play basketball. Nothing has been fixed.
And you're dead on that the spectacle just gets worse when you're away from the court. 20% of the screen being taken up by "Kyrie Irving Vaccination Status" is absurd. This isn't breaking news about a terrorist attack. And maybe the NBA media should consider how their largely black audience feels considering black male americans have among the lowest vaccination rates for any group. The NBA, teams and cities can push players to get vaccinated. The media? Stay out. Maybe demonizing players over an issue that a lot of fans can relate to is a bad move.
Last thing I'll say is, the Last Dance was eye opening for a ton of casual basketball fans. Michael Jordan was/is a god among athletes and celebrities. But maybe a lot of that status is because in the 80s/90s all we saw were the dunks, the steals, the smile. You had to be plugged into the newspaper gossip to know about the gambling and the tormenting of teammates. Maybe if Jordan was born 30 years later and was an avid social media user, we would really hate what we saw. And if he stayed off social media, the way a small handful of stars do? We probably would also like him less. Why won't he open up to us?
I think Bill Simmons had a line way back about how if you actually got to know a lot of the people you idolize, you really wouldn't like them. I can attest from my own experiences that he's probably dead on. But no matter how carefully curated the tweets or IG posts are, we're all forced into getting to know the NBA players in a way that no other sport emphasizes. And I'm certain there are plenty of good dudes in the NBA. That doesn't mean we actually want to be friends with them.
You are 100% on the money. Football is still king in the USA, and despite a bit of a dip during the CTE concerns/kneeling during the anthem/Kaepernick-gate, the game has never been more popular, both at the college and the NFL level. What the NFL does so well is it markets ALL of their teams and ALL of their players. It doesn't matter if it's big market New York Giants, Los Angeles Rams or Dallas Cowboys or small market Green Bay Packers or Buffalo Bills, all the games are fun to watch, all the teams are fun to watch and there are no such things as "super teams." Sure, NFL has superstars like Aaron Rodgers, Tom Brady and Patrick Mahomes, but how they are treated compared to the NBA is quite different.
Social media is toxic, overall. Facebook and Twitter seem to do more harm than good. The NBA social media obsession and "wokeness" I think are definitely hurting the game, but the imbalance does as well. Why do we need 30 teams when only 4 are competitive every year? Why does the NBA hone so much focus on only a select few teams and players and ignore the rest? Toronto, who won a few seasons ago, got almost no focus, as did both Milwaukee and Phoenix last year. The NFL, on the other hand, made Kansas City feel just as special as Tampa Bay last year as the New England dynasty a few years ago. Anyone has a shot in the NFL, and the NBA doesn't feel that way at all.
I also find a certain irony in NFL greats seemingly having more respect for each other, both current competitors and the retired ones still in the media game. Peyton & Eli don't spend breath on their increasingly popular MNF broadcast casting aspersions on Brady's bonafides. We can assume Mahomes, Rodgers, Lamar, Kyler, WIlson, Brady and other elite QBs are rivals, but we rarely see one openly criticize the other. On the other hand, we have an organized effort by former Lebron lackeys (RJeff, Perk, Dahntay Jones, Charlie Frye) and wanna-be acolytes (Nick Wright, McMenamin, Windhorst, Vardon) to discredit the bonafides of one Stephen Curry of Golden State Empire fame. To speak nothing of its disingenuous, negative nature, it is counterintuitive to the true stated goal of these folks: to establish LeBron as the undisputed living GOAT of the NBA. My question is, would you extend your thesis in this article to say that the Full Twitterization also poisoned the well of NBA Discourse? Maybe even as an extension of the way Gawker tinted the media as well.
I've read enough of your stuff over the years to know even the NBA playoff viewership is down, however I wonder how much the acceptance of RINGZ culture has had an effect on ratings?
As an NBA audience we have been conditioned that championships and rings are all that matter. Whether its two people debating Jordan and LeBron on twitter or Shaq on the NBA's premier broadcast dismissing Chuck because he never won a ring, we are constantly reminded that the regular season games don't matter.
Last season, the eventual champions Bucks were the contender who wasn't a contender. Giannis had as good of a season as his previous MVP seasons but was never really in the running for MVP as everybody, and especially the Media, had adopted this "the regular season doesn't matter, we need to see it in the playoffs" stance. Which is fine, but then again the underlying message is these games don't matter. They are irrelevant to the media and they are irrelevant to the best players and best teams.
If that's the case then why should they matter to the average NBA fan?
As a long-term NBA fan, it is disappointing to see statistics that the NBA viewership, popularity is not soaring. However, I get tired of some of the off the court antics, Twitter spats that has nothing to do with the game that may not turn off the "potential" casual fan. Pat Riley's and my pastor's statement "keep the main thing the main thing" is a true axiom in life, business, and basketball. The NBA needs to bring back the "I Love This Game" slogan/commercials and stay away from the trivia, Twitter wars. The NBA is a beautiful game so the joy of the game should be promoted more.
I thought the NFL would decline in popularity because of the CTE issue, with some fans turning to the NBA. Basketball seems safe for the brain, certainly safer than the NFL or NHL.
But I guess we convinced ourselves the concussion protocols make it all better? I don't know how the NFL did it, but it seems like the issue really faded away in recent years.
Great article. The twitterization of the NBA has definitely hurt it for all the reasons you just mentioned. I think the complete devaluing of the regular season (by players and media) has been just as harmful. Why watch something that these guys admit to not caring about? And then when you’re not invested during the season, it’s difficult to just pick up in the playoffs.
Good piece with a lot of explanatory power, especially combined with Russillo's correct rants about how brutal watching the last 5 minutes or so of a game are.
great stuff Ethan. and before the vaccine stories, the big news was a GM having an affair with a staffer. I don't think I could name any NFL GM's but I watched Niners vs. GB on Sunday night and was thoroughly entertained.
I've always agreed with you about tastemakers conflating the NBA's social media footprint and cultural megaphone with actual interest in the sport, that NBA Media types either don't or won't acknowledge that they tend to skew roughly 1.5 standard deviations more culturally progressive than the average American, and that Twitter is a catastrophe.
However...I think diagnosing the ratings collapse is really, really difficult and it's easy to fall victim to "this politician lost the election because they didn't endorse the policies I personally like" fallacy. Like, I genuinely don't know how to accurately weigh any of the five million possible contributing factors. My personal opinion is that NBA basketball has significantly declined in just about every possible way as an actual viewing experience in an increasingly commoditized and competitive entertainment landscape and that Reed Hastings' "Fortnite is our biggest competitor" ethos explains the decline more than Twitter blue checks and the League Office being hilariously out of touch.
To my earlier point though, I could be absolutely wrong! As you've written about, it's really hard to figure this out when there's such interest in pretending there's not actually a problem.
Great article as always. I still think the biggest reason for the NBA's decline is how little each regular season game matters, but first embracing and then being consumed by the social media soap opera can't help.
I love the NBA but NFL games are more fun to watch from start to finish. Why spend a Friday night watching a regular season NBA game when a nice full game highlights package goes on YouTube immediately after the final buzzer?
My biggest issue with the NBA has been the superteams. Ever since LeBron's The Decision special over a decade ago, the superteam has become the lifeblood of the league. Year in and year out, you can count the legitmate title contenders on one hand. And if you're not a fan of one of those teams, why bother?
This year I made a vow to not watch a single regular season game. I’ve been a basketball junkie my whole life but the dgaf of the NBA silly(regular)-season is too stark. Players don’t seem to care that much or play hard. The games at my local 24fit are more entertaining than regular season NBA games. I’ll watch the silly-season when they cut the schedule in half which will probably never happen.
This was a good take, the NBA lost how much respect due to the China tweet by Morey in Houston? Also how much money and respect did the NBA lose in China? Whitlock is the only person who's talked at all about the NBA China connection and how corrupt it is. The most popular show on the NBA and one that when it stops I'll stop watching the small amount I do now is Inside on TNT, and that is solely because of Chuck and how he says what he wants for the most part but even he's talked about how reigned in he is. They have this appearance of openness but we all know that is a total lie.
The thing that I don't see discussed much if at all about the NBA and how it's ratings have tanked is the fact that the product isn't as good as it used to be. I don't know any basketball fan that thinks this product is as great as it used to be, we still watch, most less than they used to but it's unbearable to finish some games.
1) There aren't very many in the media that are willing to admit how bad it's become (Bill Simmons is one since he's been fired from ESPN he's much like yourself on willing and able to say what he thinks, some of the time and he rails against the product). The NBA game is at times unwatchable with the time stops to review things like flagrant calls, who touched what last, any number of things that no true basketball fans care about. I don't care if someone's elbow got a little too close to the other guys face, there have been games where a couple minutes have turned into 30 plus because of all the stoppages. Why would anyone think fans care about getting to some 6 sigma level of accuracy with refs?
2) The stoppages are also a function of too many timeouts, sorry but how about some flow to the game and you don't have an infinite amount of timeouts and force you to actually play the game as it's intended to be played, fluidly (I hate to say it but like Soccer, I hate the game but it's at least fluid when the players are faking everything). The NFL has 3 timeouts per half and they are valuable to have.
3) NBA refs are the worst in the business. The NFL has flirted with the level of star treatment, mainly for the QB though, and when they creep closer to the NBA they will have more and more fans stop watching. NBA stars are refed a completely different way than non star athletes, it's there for everyone there to see and it's just infuriating how blatant it is. I give credence to the TD accusation about Lakers vs Kings, and how NBA wants some to win at others if they can do something about it. Stars get calls, and even if you have a star they don't get the calls of x superstar so just sit back and watch dribble dribble dribble shot free throws all game.
The NBA-NFL divide is a perfect allegory for the country as a whole. The NBA is cool, it’s hip, it’s the future, it’s WAY bigger on social media, and it’s getting absolutely crushed by the NFL. The NBA may be mostly black players but it’s the sport of my people and Twitter’s population - social science college graduates. The league will eventually learn that catering SO heavily to this small population at the expense of the wider public is terrible business, but for now the NBA just gets think-pieces from people like me on how it’s the future of sports and entertainment while its ratings tank and the NFL - the “boomer league” - just keeps printing money.
You could make a good argument about the relative importance of each regular season game for the NBA vs NFL and come to some valid conclusions about why opening day ratings aren't a fair comparison.
And you could maybe make the point that the NFL, like baseball, has ratings carried by old people who aren't NBA fans. And advertisers (the ones paying for the massive TV contracts which fuel the leagues) don't care about old people.
Cool. So what if we look at the Super Bowl vs NBA Finals? And only for the key demo (18-49 year olds). Yeah, the Super Bowl is more of an event itself that appeals beyond the sports fan... but it should be close, right?
In 2021, the Super Bowl nabbed 34.3 million viewers in the key demo. Which is a huge decline from a decade ago when it was routinely in the 50 million range.
The 2021 NBA Finals? The clinching game 6 brought in a peak of 16.6 million TOTAL viewers.
Ouch.
The NBA is harder to watch in ways that the ratings folks count. The regional sports networks that show most local games require expensive and archaic cable packages in most markets. The "national" games are still largely on cable tv. I'd love to know what percentage of fans illegally stream games. But regardless, that has to lead to lesser interest by the time we hit the later rounds of the playoffs. At least to some degree.
Still I'll agree the embrace of spectacle over sport (I'm taking "twitterization" to be a metaphor for that) has to be at least a decent share of the issue.
Fans, especially more conservative white fans who make up close to half the country and an even greater share of the TV audience, get fairly stereotyped for complaining about aesthetics or distractions from the game. Too much complaining, too much showboating, too much flopping, too much traveling (never try to explain the two step rule to the 63 year old guy behind you who is wearing a football jersey to an NBA game and is four $11 beers into the night).
I don't want to try and guess what amount of that is code for people not liking the antics of African American athletes. I'm sure it's a big number. But still, the NFL put a stop to elaborate endzone dances. Offsides and false start penalties limit how much time a player can spend complaining about a call. And a travel just seems to get way more negative energy than a holding call that is missed. Point being, out of structure of the game and intentional changes - the NFL shuts down a lot of the stuff the angry old drunk guy behind you might complain about.
The NBA? They turn it into youtube clips. They've gotten way better about policing flopping and excessive fighting with refs. But people still see James Harden play basketball. Nothing has been fixed.
And you're dead on that the spectacle just gets worse when you're away from the court. 20% of the screen being taken up by "Kyrie Irving Vaccination Status" is absurd. This isn't breaking news about a terrorist attack. And maybe the NBA media should consider how their largely black audience feels considering black male americans have among the lowest vaccination rates for any group. The NBA, teams and cities can push players to get vaccinated. The media? Stay out. Maybe demonizing players over an issue that a lot of fans can relate to is a bad move.
Last thing I'll say is, the Last Dance was eye opening for a ton of casual basketball fans. Michael Jordan was/is a god among athletes and celebrities. But maybe a lot of that status is because in the 80s/90s all we saw were the dunks, the steals, the smile. You had to be plugged into the newspaper gossip to know about the gambling and the tormenting of teammates. Maybe if Jordan was born 30 years later and was an avid social media user, we would really hate what we saw. And if he stayed off social media, the way a small handful of stars do? We probably would also like him less. Why won't he open up to us?
I think Bill Simmons had a line way back about how if you actually got to know a lot of the people you idolize, you really wouldn't like them. I can attest from my own experiences that he's probably dead on. But no matter how carefully curated the tweets or IG posts are, we're all forced into getting to know the NBA players in a way that no other sport emphasizes. And I'm certain there are plenty of good dudes in the NBA. That doesn't mean we actually want to be friends with them.
You are 100% on the money. Football is still king in the USA, and despite a bit of a dip during the CTE concerns/kneeling during the anthem/Kaepernick-gate, the game has never been more popular, both at the college and the NFL level. What the NFL does so well is it markets ALL of their teams and ALL of their players. It doesn't matter if it's big market New York Giants, Los Angeles Rams or Dallas Cowboys or small market Green Bay Packers or Buffalo Bills, all the games are fun to watch, all the teams are fun to watch and there are no such things as "super teams." Sure, NFL has superstars like Aaron Rodgers, Tom Brady and Patrick Mahomes, but how they are treated compared to the NBA is quite different.
Social media is toxic, overall. Facebook and Twitter seem to do more harm than good. The NBA social media obsession and "wokeness" I think are definitely hurting the game, but the imbalance does as well. Why do we need 30 teams when only 4 are competitive every year? Why does the NBA hone so much focus on only a select few teams and players and ignore the rest? Toronto, who won a few seasons ago, got almost no focus, as did both Milwaukee and Phoenix last year. The NFL, on the other hand, made Kansas City feel just as special as Tampa Bay last year as the New England dynasty a few years ago. Anyone has a shot in the NFL, and the NBA doesn't feel that way at all.
I also find a certain irony in NFL greats seemingly having more respect for each other, both current competitors and the retired ones still in the media game. Peyton & Eli don't spend breath on their increasingly popular MNF broadcast casting aspersions on Brady's bonafides. We can assume Mahomes, Rodgers, Lamar, Kyler, WIlson, Brady and other elite QBs are rivals, but we rarely see one openly criticize the other. On the other hand, we have an organized effort by former Lebron lackeys (RJeff, Perk, Dahntay Jones, Charlie Frye) and wanna-be acolytes (Nick Wright, McMenamin, Windhorst, Vardon) to discredit the bonafides of one Stephen Curry of Golden State Empire fame. To speak nothing of its disingenuous, negative nature, it is counterintuitive to the true stated goal of these folks: to establish LeBron as the undisputed living GOAT of the NBA. My question is, would you extend your thesis in this article to say that the Full Twitterization also poisoned the well of NBA Discourse? Maybe even as an extension of the way Gawker tinted the media as well.
I've read enough of your stuff over the years to know even the NBA playoff viewership is down, however I wonder how much the acceptance of RINGZ culture has had an effect on ratings?
As an NBA audience we have been conditioned that championships and rings are all that matter. Whether its two people debating Jordan and LeBron on twitter or Shaq on the NBA's premier broadcast dismissing Chuck because he never won a ring, we are constantly reminded that the regular season games don't matter.
Last season, the eventual champions Bucks were the contender who wasn't a contender. Giannis had as good of a season as his previous MVP seasons but was never really in the running for MVP as everybody, and especially the Media, had adopted this "the regular season doesn't matter, we need to see it in the playoffs" stance. Which is fine, but then again the underlying message is these games don't matter. They are irrelevant to the media and they are irrelevant to the best players and best teams.
If that's the case then why should they matter to the average NBA fan?
As a long-term NBA fan, it is disappointing to see statistics that the NBA viewership, popularity is not soaring. However, I get tired of some of the off the court antics, Twitter spats that has nothing to do with the game that may not turn off the "potential" casual fan. Pat Riley's and my pastor's statement "keep the main thing the main thing" is a true axiom in life, business, and basketball. The NBA needs to bring back the "I Love This Game" slogan/commercials and stay away from the trivia, Twitter wars. The NBA is a beautiful game so the joy of the game should be promoted more.
I thought the NFL would decline in popularity because of the CTE issue, with some fans turning to the NBA. Basketball seems safe for the brain, certainly safer than the NFL or NHL.
But I guess we convinced ourselves the concussion protocols make it all better? I don't know how the NFL did it, but it seems like the issue really faded away in recent years.
Great article. The twitterization of the NBA has definitely hurt it for all the reasons you just mentioned. I think the complete devaluing of the regular season (by players and media) has been just as harmful. Why watch something that these guys admit to not caring about? And then when you’re not invested during the season, it’s difficult to just pick up in the playoffs.
Good piece with a lot of explanatory power, especially combined with Russillo's correct rants about how brutal watching the last 5 minutes or so of a game are.
great stuff Ethan. and before the vaccine stories, the big news was a GM having an affair with a staffer. I don't think I could name any NFL GM's but I watched Niners vs. GB on Sunday night and was thoroughly entertained.
I've always agreed with you about tastemakers conflating the NBA's social media footprint and cultural megaphone with actual interest in the sport, that NBA Media types either don't or won't acknowledge that they tend to skew roughly 1.5 standard deviations more culturally progressive than the average American, and that Twitter is a catastrophe.
However...I think diagnosing the ratings collapse is really, really difficult and it's easy to fall victim to "this politician lost the election because they didn't endorse the policies I personally like" fallacy. Like, I genuinely don't know how to accurately weigh any of the five million possible contributing factors. My personal opinion is that NBA basketball has significantly declined in just about every possible way as an actual viewing experience in an increasingly commoditized and competitive entertainment landscape and that Reed Hastings' "Fortnite is our biggest competitor" ethos explains the decline more than Twitter blue checks and the League Office being hilariously out of touch.
To my earlier point though, I could be absolutely wrong! As you've written about, it's really hard to figure this out when there's such interest in pretending there's not actually a problem.
Great article as always. I still think the biggest reason for the NBA's decline is how little each regular season game matters, but first embracing and then being consumed by the social media soap opera can't help.
I love the NBA but NFL games are more fun to watch from start to finish. Why spend a Friday night watching a regular season NBA game when a nice full game highlights package goes on YouTube immediately after the final buzzer?
My biggest issue with the NBA has been the superteams. Ever since LeBron's The Decision special over a decade ago, the superteam has become the lifeblood of the league. Year in and year out, you can count the legitmate title contenders on one hand. And if you're not a fan of one of those teams, why bother?
This year I made a vow to not watch a single regular season game. I’ve been a basketball junkie my whole life but the dgaf of the NBA silly(regular)-season is too stark. Players don’t seem to care that much or play hard. The games at my local 24fit are more entertaining than regular season NBA games. I’ll watch the silly-season when they cut the schedule in half which will probably never happen.
This was a good take, the NBA lost how much respect due to the China tweet by Morey in Houston? Also how much money and respect did the NBA lose in China? Whitlock is the only person who's talked at all about the NBA China connection and how corrupt it is. The most popular show on the NBA and one that when it stops I'll stop watching the small amount I do now is Inside on TNT, and that is solely because of Chuck and how he says what he wants for the most part but even he's talked about how reigned in he is. They have this appearance of openness but we all know that is a total lie.
The thing that I don't see discussed much if at all about the NBA and how it's ratings have tanked is the fact that the product isn't as good as it used to be. I don't know any basketball fan that thinks this product is as great as it used to be, we still watch, most less than they used to but it's unbearable to finish some games.
1) There aren't very many in the media that are willing to admit how bad it's become (Bill Simmons is one since he's been fired from ESPN he's much like yourself on willing and able to say what he thinks, some of the time and he rails against the product). The NBA game is at times unwatchable with the time stops to review things like flagrant calls, who touched what last, any number of things that no true basketball fans care about. I don't care if someone's elbow got a little too close to the other guys face, there have been games where a couple minutes have turned into 30 plus because of all the stoppages. Why would anyone think fans care about getting to some 6 sigma level of accuracy with refs?
2) The stoppages are also a function of too many timeouts, sorry but how about some flow to the game and you don't have an infinite amount of timeouts and force you to actually play the game as it's intended to be played, fluidly (I hate to say it but like Soccer, I hate the game but it's at least fluid when the players are faking everything). The NFL has 3 timeouts per half and they are valuable to have.
3) NBA refs are the worst in the business. The NFL has flirted with the level of star treatment, mainly for the QB though, and when they creep closer to the NBA they will have more and more fans stop watching. NBA stars are refed a completely different way than non star athletes, it's there for everyone there to see and it's just infuriating how blatant it is. I give credence to the TD accusation about Lakers vs Kings, and how NBA wants some to win at others if they can do something about it. Stars get calls, and even if you have a star they don't get the calls of x superstar so just sit back and watch dribble dribble dribble shot free throws all game.