There can be little doubt that the NBA’s television ratings are in decline.
Regular season viewership dropped for a third straight year, with ABC, ESPN and TNT each having their least-watched seasons since 2007-08. ABC tied the lowest rating ever for an individual game on broadcast (1.0 for Rockets/Wizards in March) and the second-lowest for a full season (2.2). Twelve games earned fewer than one million viewers, more than double last year’s total. Excluding the Cavaliers’ 25 appearances, fully two-thirds of the league’s national TV games earned a smaller audience than last year.
The downward trend continued into the playoffs, as 51 of 75 games declined from last year entering the NBA Finals — including a whopping 49 of 61 non-Cavaliers games. Bulls/Bucks Game 6 earned just 1.7 million viewers in the first round, the smallest audience for a primetime playoff game on ABC, ESPN or TNT in six years (excludes ESPN2 and NBA TV). The Hawks/Wizards series generated the five smallest second round audiences in five years, with Game 1 tying the lowest rating ever for a playoff game on ABC (2.1). Cavaliers/Hawks, despite the presence of LeBron James, was the least-watched Eastern Conference Finals since 2008.
Considering those statistics, one might think the league has slipped back into the mid-2000s doldrums — but these are not quite the days of the Spurs and Pistons. The NBA is still doing well enough relative to its competition. On several occasions last month, playoff games on cable were the top programs on all of television in the key adults 18-49 demographic (a not-unusual result this time of year). A second round doubleheader of Cavaliers/Bulls and Rockets/Clippers topped everything else on television, including seven season finales on the major networks.
The league has also compared favorably to its chief rival among the four major sports, Major League Baseball. Both Warriors/Rockets (7.4M) and Cavaliers/Hawks (6.8M) finished comfortably ahead of baseball’s comparable League Championship Series, Royals/Orioles (5.0M) and Giants/Cardinals (4.5M). The NBA’s regular season numbers also outpaced MLB, with ABC’s 2.2 regular season average topping the last seven seasons of MLB on FOX.
It should be pointed out that not all of the comparisons are favorable. The NCAA Tournament has left the NBA Playoffs in the dust as basketball’s chief TV draw, turning what was already a large gap between the events into a rout. Outside of an NBA Finals Game 7, it is unlikely any NBA game will soon match the 28.3 million viewers for this year’s Duke/Wisconsin title game — or even the 22.6 million for Wisconsin/Kentucky in the Final Four (on cable).
With that reality check out of the way, the league can also be encouraged by the sudden emergence of the Golden State Warriors. In a year when needle-movers such as the Heat, Thunder and Lakers each fell into the lottery, the Warriors have suddenly become a TV draw. The final two games of the Warriors/Rockets Western Conference Finals each topped eight million viewers, with Game 5 scoring the sixth-largest audience for a West playoff game under the current TV deal (dates back to 2002). The series was the highest rated and most-watched West final in three years, and the first since 2010 to top the comparable series in the East.
The Cavaliers/Warriors NBA Finals, given the Cavaliers’ season-long impact on the ratings and the Warriors’ increasing profile, figures to be a stronger draw than the past two years — when the Heat’s drawing power was hampered by the Spurs’ more limited appeal.
All of which is to say that the NBA has had far better years, but is still holding up. The momentum from LeBron’s move to Miami has dissipated completely, the numbers have in most cases fallen back to 2008 levels, and the league is even further back of the college game — yet it remains a healthy television attraction. It has weathered the decline of the Heat, Thunder and Lakers and continued to fare well against most competition. For a league in fairly obvious decline, it is doing about as well as possible.
Tags: NBA Ratings
