Decline In NBA Viewership

Matthew Robi

- - The NBA has historically had the most skilled basketball players for the past 75 years, and this sentiment still stands strong today. But if the NBA hasn't diminished in talent, what is causing the decline in viewership?

NBA’s viewership has been plummeting in recent years, and fans have a few theories as to why. Some fans suspect the regular season format is responsible for the decline and needs to be reworked. Others believe the decrease in viewership is due to lasting effects of covid. NBA commissioner Adam Silver should be concerned about the decrease in viewership because truthfully, the NBA is leaving money on the table.

The pandemic affected different companies in unique ways. Still, the NBA's decline is especially concerning because if you look at other sports organizations, many of them are doing better than ever. During the 2021-22 NFL season their rating increased by 10% in comparison to their 2015-16 season. Since viewership is the sole responsibility of sports enthusiasts, who better to ask than the fans themselves. When Jon Pry (14-year NBA viewer) was asked what has the NBA done in the past that the current league could learn from he replied: “The game changed in a way that is less entertaining, the league is too super-team-centric. Big men are effectively useless now unless they can shoot the 3, so that leaves fewer play schemes. I liked it better when every position had its own unique skill set”. The current NBA doesn’t offer much offensively. At times it feels like we are just watching ten players running around and taking turns jacking up threes. When asked if Covid had a heavy impact on viewership, Jon said, “yes, because it wasn't available for much of the pandemic and people took it out of their lives and replaced it with other things for a while. Due to this, when the NBA resumed it wasn’t easily readjusted back into people's lives”. Ethan Kilbreath (Sports columnist for The Daily) had this to say about the current NBA: “If you buy tickets to a game expecting to see your favorite athletes play there is a very high chance the very best players won’t play in the game”. He went on to also say, "because the seeding doesn’t matter a bunch, it’s just a matter of who can rest their players and stay healthy”. The regular season is a joke at this point because more teams make the playoffs than don’t. Without the incentive to have a super competitive regular season, most organizations would rather rest their players to prevent injuries and maintain a healthy roster for the post-season. After all, why would you take that risk when you are paying each player millions of dollars for the chance at a championship.

In a segment on ESPN's Stephen A Smith show, CJ McCollum exposed the NBA's management teams for resting players. He explained, "There is this misconception if you will that players just choose to sit out games". He added that in his time with Lillard in Portland "there was times where we'd go through the calendar and we would be supposed to pick rest days". In order to protect their nine-figure endorsement, teams would force players to rest to avoid games that are considered "high risk of injury". Some believe a way to solve this problem is to decrease the 82-game regular season.

In a press release, Adam Silver had this to say about injuries and decreasing the regular season games: "As I have said before, what we don't see is increased numbers of injuries as the season goes on," Silver also said, "It's not as if because of fatigue over the course of a season, you see more injuries. We do see a connection between actual fatigue, for example, from back-to-backs or three in a row. We think that potentially can lead to more injuries." Another issue with changing the regular season format is it would be impossible to break past regular-season records if the season is shortened.

Although the NBA isn’t anywhere near irrelevancy and still makes roughly 9 billion dollars in revenue. The NBA should be thinking about ways to improve, particularly since they have the least exciting regular/post-season format in all of American major sports. Similar to everyone else, NBA fans have short attention spans and may move on if the league doesn’t make a change soon.