Lonzo Ball collected the ball in the first half of Saturday’s game between the Chicago Bulls and Boston Celtics. He passed on an open jump shot from the elbow, sprinted for the three-point line and launched a shot that clanged off the rim.
Two longtime NBA scouts watched the sequence unfold from press row.
“That’s the new NBA right there,” said one. “You can’t shoot [when you’re] wide open!”
He shook his head and rubbed his forehead.
“It’s ugly to watch,” said the other.
They sounded like a couple of NBA podcasters.
The NBA signed 11-year, US$76 billion (NZ$134.3b) broadcast contracts this year, but that euphoria has given way to a winter of discontent for the league.
TV ratings are down. Three-pointers are up. Way up. (The Bulls and Hornets combined to miss 75 in a single game this month, an NBA record.) The league just announced plans to shake up All-Star Weekend, its latest effort to juice lagging interest during the regular season. Christmas, long a showcase day for the league, is set to be dominated by the NFL’s debut on Netflix.
The discourse around the NBA has responded in kind — and most of it has been unkind.
Fox Sports host Colin Cowherd, in examining the sinking TV ratings, compared the NBA to the Democratic Party: “Once you detach from regular people in America, you will pay a price.” JJ Redick, talking head turned Los Angeles Lakers coach, said the league’s media is to blame for not celebrating players more. Other topics that have polarised the commentariat: too many foreign stars; no successors to LeBron James and Stephen Curry; the three-pointers and homogenised play; too many games; Charles Barkley; politics; analytics.
Noted NBA fan and the Ringer founder Bill Simmons, for the record, thinks the league is in a cyclic lull and will be fine.
Still, there is palpable angst. Before the Celtics-Bulls game tipped off — and the teams combined to shoot a whopping 86 three-pointers, making just one-third of them — Sam Smith, who has covered the Bulls since the 1980s and written several books on the NBA and its history, lamented the state of the league. He ached for the days of David Stern, the imperious former NBA commissioner; wondered what had become of the league’s once-famed rivalries; and ticked off, from memory, all the star players who have missed time this season.
“If the stars aren’t playing, who cares?” he asked. “The biggest thing to me is that the NBA has sent a message to its fans that it doesn’t care about the regular season, so why should they care about the regular season?”
He added: “The NBA has to be worried. You can tell by how many innovations they’re making that it’s an acknowledgment of holy s***.”
Brian Scalabrine, a former NBA player and now a TV analyst for the Celtics, took a rosier view, suggesting the league is already formulating changes. “Remember that 20 years ago, you maybe could play on a sore knee,” he said. “Go f***ing try to guard these guys right now on a sore f***ing knee. Good luck. So players are just way better now.” He continued, “They got the TV money, and now [Commissioner] Adam Silver … has a plan to make some changes.”
First, a word about TV ratings
A popular statistic making the rounds, one cited by Cowherd, is that national NBA TV broadcasts have lost nearly half their viewership since the 2011-12 lockout-shortened season. The league averaged more than 2.5 million viewers per nationally televised game that year; this year, the number is around 1.4 million. (This year, the league is down around 18% compared to last year.)
NBA stakeholders are quick to point out all the context that’s missing and grumble that talking heads love to pick on the league. They cite record-high franchise values, booming attendance and lofty social media interest. Within the confines of TV, entertainment programming has suffered a greater collapse, and the cable bundle has lost tens of millions of homes over that span. MLB (21%), the NHL (19%) and college basketball (more than 50%) are down, too. The NBA also is competing more and more this season with the NFL and college football, which increasingly dominate sports culture.
But it’s instructive to understand where those viewership losses are coming from.
To Cowherd’s point, the NBA’s TV audience has become more urban and affluent, following some of the same trendlines as support for the Democrats — including an increased percentage of viewers making at least $150,000. The share of viewers outside of the top 100 TV markets has shrunk by a few percentage points over the past five years. But the primary reason for the viewership decline is young people and their changing viewing habits. Viewership from 18- to 34-year-olds is down more than 30% over the same five years — which is also the demographic most likely to opt out of the cable bundle. (Streaming now accounts for nearly half, or 42%, of all TV consumption.)
“The NBA has always traded on having a younger audience, but maybe it’s hurting them in that younger people are more likely to cut the cord and watch less TV,” one TV executive said. “It seems logical that younger-skewing, cable-heavy NBA is getting crushed while older-skewing, broadcast-heavy NFL and [college football] have been pretty stable.”
To be sure, not every sport is down among young viewers. MLB, for example, had double-digit growth on cable last season among 18- to 34-year-olds. But it’s very possible these missing NBA fans still follow the league, on social media and in person. And the league hopes to increase viewership by putting more games on Prime Video and broadcast TV next season. It also has those massive TV deals in place for the next decade so it has time to figure out how to monetise those fans.
The discourse, however, is another question.
‘We need more a**holes’
Sports are almost always dying in some form. During the past decade, reporters wondered whether we had reached “peak NFL” in an age of concussions, player protests and falling TV ratings. Baseball has been on its deathbed for decades. The NBA in the mid-2000s changed its rules to fix an oft-criticised and overly defensive game.
But a canvassing of NBA reporters and commentators — the people who care most about the league — revealed concern for its current predicament, if not its long-term staying power.
Kirk Goldsberry, a former San Antonio Spurs executive now with the Ringer, noticed the three-pointer’s ascension as far back as 2014. He wrote a book in 2019 calling for the league to address what he viewed as a growing crisis.
“One of the reasons I left [the league] is because of how the three-pointer is deforming this game and Gregg Popovich wouldn’t let me write this book,” he said. “What if the league is as cool as its signature shot? It used to be a dunk. Now it’s a corner three.” (The league has said it has data that shows fans like the three-pointer; Silver also has said the league is studying its impact.)
Rule changes can help, and the NBA has made them before. Goldsberry supports moving the three-point line back. Scalabrine thought the league could allow defences more freedom by eliminating the three-second rule.
Others worried more about structural issues for the league and its media ecosystem with one recurring note familiar to any reporter or screenwriter: the game needs more tension on a night-to-night basis.
“Efficiency doesn’t always equal better. Fans don’t watch basketball for the spreadsheet,” Yahoo’s Vincent Goodwill said. “ ... We need more a**holes who are actually good. We need a thug or two that can play.” Kendrick Perkins, a former player and ESPN analyst, added, “Fans are not stupid — they know a lack of competition”.
Frank Isola, a longtime NBA reporter and commentator, put it another way: “The WNBA today has a better marketing pitch to fans: ‘We play all the time, and we hate each other’.”
Brian Windhorst, a national reporter for ESPN, pointed to the media landscape and the incentives of social media for warping the league. He pointed out a recent tweet from a reporter of the Phoenix Suns’ Oso Ighodaro practising an awkward-looking three-point shot. The video received millions of views, with comments mostly poking fun at Ighodaro. “That is why I say that the NBA media is in a bad place. It would be much better if we focused and leaned into storytelling that helped enrich the fan experience. But the things that get the most reaction are controversial or negative, and because they get so much attention, the aggregators amplify them.”
(Windhorst and Scalabrine also remain convinced that anyone not seeing nightly greatness from the league needs to look harder.)
At the Bulls game, United Centre was packed, the crowd was energetic and the style of play was inescapable. The Bulls and Celtics lead the league in three-point attempts, and trip after trip down the court players camped out at the three-point line and fired away.
Asked what he might tell an NBA fan who didn’t like the aesthetics of so much three-point shooting, Bulls coach Billy Donovan said: “Every person has a right to spend their money and their time as they see fit. I’m not going to sit there and sell why somebody should do something … I’m just not.”
He added: “I watch basketball. It’s kind of what I love.”