Can NBA Ratings Grow Again? Don’t Bet on It
Read enough appraisals of the NBA season about to begin Oct. 18, and a theme clearly emerges: Prognosticators have no idea which team is going to win the championship this year.
That’s because pro basketball has demonstrated something starting last season that it has been criticized for lacking over too many years to count: parity. Often enough, one basketball team or another achieves some kind of dynastic dominance that casts a shadow over the rest of the league.
But not for the 2022-23 season. The Golden State Warriors may be coming off their fourth title in eight years, but there are at least seven other teams out there cited as serious challengers to Steph Curry collecting a fifth Larry O’Brien NBA Championship Trophy.
That would appear to be great news for the rights holders of national NBA games — Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery — as well as oodles of regional sports networks offering local-team telecasts. The more competitive the league, the more interesting it is; the more interesting it is, the more people will watch games.
Unfortunately it may not be so simple for the NBA. And one of the biggest reasons why is a certain seven-foot-plus player who isn’t even in the league yet. But we’ll get to him in a moment.
Don’t bet on the NBA being able to reach the 1.6 million viewers that ESPN, ABC and TNT broadcasts averaged in the regular season — an impressive number considering it topped 2018-19, the most recent season unmarred by the pandemic. Even better: Regular-season and postseason ad sales were $1.31 billion, up 39% compared with 2018-19. That’s great for the NBA, which represents the next big rights deal in sports to expire in 2025.
But it should also be noted that the NBA probably benefited from out-of-home ratings getting counted for the first time by Nielsen. In addition, the 2022 NBA Finals drew underwhelming audiences versus previous years despite having two strong teams from major markets in the Bay Area and New England face off in the championship.
And that sponsorship growth was probably inflated by an influx of crypto sponsorships, which are probably not going to total anything close to the $130 million from last season now that the crypto winter is upon us.
What may be even more worrisome is that all pro sports leagues are facing a new generation of fans who may not have the patience to sit through games when the on-court action is more digestible to ADD-addled Gen Zers in thinly sliced microbits served up on social media (as noted in the chart below from VIP+'s "Sports TV Formula" special report). That doesn’t bode well in the long term for rights holders if the audience that regularly turns out for games starts to shrink to only hardcore fans.
Still, that’s not what’s most worrisome about the NBA maintaining its level of competition just as it is poised to peak. Strangely enough, it all comes down to one man: Victor Wembanyama.
Perhaps you’ve caught wind of the hype enveloping this French phenom whose height is pegged somewhere between 7-foot-2 and 7-foot-5, according to estimates. But sheer size isn’t really the point here, even though league play has largely moved away from the traditional big men who lumber around the court like dinosaurs. They dominated the game for decades before three-point sharpshooters like Curry came along, and there are still plenty of 7-foot players active.
The reason Wembanyama is being anticipated for the 2023-24 season with messianic fervor is there’s never been a player of his size who moves as fast and shoots as well. LeBron James likened him to an alien; there’s simply is no other human who plays the game like Wembanyama.
That would seem great for TV ratings and game attendance in the future, but there’s a shorter-term pitfall the league will not be able to avoid: We’re just months away from watching what will likely be a record number of teams tanking in order to compete for the first draft pick, which Wembanyama is a lock to get, barring injury.
For those not familiar with the term, “tanking” is when a team deliberately but subtly loses as many games as possible in order to compete for the best pick in the draft. It may sound counterintuitive to lose in the short term to win in the long term, but a handful of teams do it every year.
But in 2022-23, it will be a lot more than a handful. Any team that realizes it doesn't have a solid shot to make the postseason and has a first-round draft pick for next season is going to check out early. This will prove terrible for regular-season games, which will be rife with lopsided blowouts from the sheer volume of second- and third-tier teams. As a result, local and national ratings will suffer.
What will embolden more teams than ever to try and fail their way into the top pick is that the consolation prize for those who end up with second, third or fourth picks is not too shabby, either. Were Wembanyama not in the mix, it’s quite possible there would be outsize hype for the man who will undoubtedly go second in the draft, a gifted guard by the name of Scoot Henderson. That anyone can even forecast who the top draft picks are before the NCAA basketball season tips off is a testament to how unique this year is.
What could also weigh on ratings is another bit of NBA jargon: "load management." This is a euphemism that creeped into basketball in recent years that refers to teams deciding to keep star players out of select games even though they aren’t injured just to give them a break over a grueling 82-game schedule. Merciful as that may be to their aching muscles, fans are less incentivized to watch when the main attraction is sitting on the bench.
It’s quite possible we’re going to see a ton of load management this year considering the number of thirtysomething veterans and stars coming off serious injuries that teams will want to rest as much as possible so they are fresh for the playoffs.
It's just another reason the regular season may not be all it's cracked up to be. Fans can only hope the crowded field of contenders can rise above everything else that could weigh down the NBA in 2022-23.
