Are NBA TV Ratings Really ‘Big Trouble’ for Basketball?

President Trump attacked the NBA last week, saying the league is in “big trouble” and blaming its supposedly poor ratings on the players kneeling during the national anthem to protest police brutality and racial inequality.

“It’s been horrible for basketball. Look at the basketball ratings. People are angry about it,” Trump said during an interview on Clay Travis’ radio show. “They have enough politics with guys like me. They don’t need more. There was a nastiness about the NBA and the way it was done. The NBA is in trouble. Big trouble.”

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However, making a concrete assessment of the NBA ratings since re-start, or finding one single reason for their decline, is far from simple.

According to Nielsen numbers, NBA viewership (P2+) was down around 13% versus last season before the shutdown (prior to March 12). The first week of games since the re-start were down 4% from the NBA’s pre-corona average, however, primetime games on ESPN and TNT in that same time period were up 6% in viewership when compared with the first chunk of the season.

In fact, according to industry sources, NBA viewership post-shutdown is up 8% versus the prior year, when compared with spring 2019 end-of-season games. But it is worth noting that number is comparing the same games and windows as last season, meaning that it doesn’t take the afternoon or pre-primetime games the league has been forced to schedule into account, given that there are no direct comparisons.

“There is no proper context to compare the current NBA viewership post-COVID to any regular season,” says Tom McGovern, president of Omnicom Group’s sports media division Optimum Sports. “You’ve got an increased number of broadcast windows and start times that are an anomaly for this current season. The number of windows alone is going to dilute your average rating, you’ll have no West Coast prime time.”

Sources also point out that 8% bump is not as large as the spikes that other sports have been noting since re-starting. For instance, the NHL is up 57% versus the end of last year’s regular season, and MLB games so far this season are up 18% on last year.

It’s true that one might have expected the NBA’s numbers to rocket on its return, given how starved of live action sports fans were for several months.

The first night of bubble games was headlined by a mouth-watering encounter between LeBron James’ Los Angeles Lakers and Kawhi Leonard’s Los Angeles Clippers. The game was a nail-biter, yet the numbers (3.4 million viewers) were the lowest for any Lakers-Clippers game so far this season.

From the beginning of re-start, it became abundantly clear that NBA games weren’t necessarily going to hit the heights of an average regular season.

There are plenty of possible explanations for this, beyond the President’s hunch that it’s to do with the protests.

“Similar to the NFL when similar statements were made with Colin Kaepernick, we never really saw any direct indication of audience decline directly related to the protest,” says McGovern. “There are a lot of reasons why they had decline, but you couldn’t really say that was because of protests.”

One such explanation could simply be that folks just aren’t watching as much TV (at least not in the traditional cable and broadcast sense) this summer. PUT (People Using Television) levels have taken a much-documented tumble across the board board over the last couple months. So far this summer, PUT levels are down around 18% compared to the end of March and April, which is when these games would have been airing in a regular season.

“The biggest competition right now is summer. There’s a reason why most sports don’t play in July and August, it’s because PUTs are down and you’re competing with lifestyle,” McGovern says. “I would say anybody who’s looking at average rating and say it’s down or up would be irresponsible. There’s no context to it, there are no comparables.”

The packed schedule that the NBA has been forced into as a result of COVID could also be a contributing factor. Many of the games are being played in the early afternoon or late morning, depending on which coast you’re on, which obviously would not be the case normally. Take the the first round of playoff games which begin next week as an example. Just yesterday, the Utah Jazz and the Denver Nuggets tipped off at 10:30am PT, while later in the week, the Indiana Pacers and the Miami Heat will play the second game in their series at 10am PT on a Thursday.