NBA players are very upset with President Trump for pointing out that NBA ratings are down and tying it to the NBA’s turn toward politics. Whether it’s Trump’s place to opine on this or not, he is correct in his diagnosis.
A Harris poll found that 39% of sports fans are watching fewer basketball games. Among those watching fewer games, 38% said the league was too political, and 19% cited the NBA’s subservience to China. The partisan gap between Republicans and Democrats watching the NBA is larger than in any other sport, with only one-third of Republicans actively following the league.
The ratings bear this out as well. While the coronavirus led to a season delay that pushed the playoffs later into the year, NBA ratings were already down before the delay. As the Athletic’s Ethan Strauss noted, the “most precipitous drop” in the league’s ratings amid its prolonged decline was at the start of the 2019-20 season, after Daryl Morey kicked off the league’s Hong Kong controversy.
Seeing ratings drop because of politics is not unique to the NBA either. NFL ratings fell in consecutive years in 2016 and 2017, losing 3 million viewers from the 2015 season in a drop that tracks with the kneeling protests kickstarted by Colin Kaepernick.
And yet, the NBA is not the ratings juggernaut that the NFL is. The NBA’s first day back from its three-day social justice “boycott” saw LeBron James’s Lakers lose a head-to-head ratings matchup with NASCAR. In a span of eight years, the NBA has lost 45% of its audience for prime-time games on ABC, where big games would net even casual league fans.
The NBA’s cratering ratings, combined with the league being disciplined by the Chinese government for Morey’s comments, leaves it in a jam, with the league’s broadcast deal with ESPN and Turner Sports expiring in 2025. Television deals are what pay the bills: The league’s current deal is worth more than $2.5 billion per year.
The NBA wants to pretend that its hard turn to social justice is no big deal, but it’s becoming more clear by the day that viewers aren’t interested. As the NBA becomes more and more partisan, the league will continue to leak viewers. For every jaw-dropping alley-oop and game-winning shot, viewers are now being met with a post-game lecture from James or Gregg Popovich, and they’re increasingly deciding that the game isn’t worth the politics.
