There is debate about whether ESPN’s broadcast of Tiger Woods’s debut in the dreadful TGL garnered slightly more viewers than the game between the Cleveland Cavaliers and the Indiana Pacers last Tuesday night. His debut as a virtual golfer drew 1.05 million people at its peak but still averaged just less than the NBA clash managed across two separate channels, TNT and TruTV. Parsing the numbers doesn’t disguise the depressing fact the Cavaliers, a genuine title contender, couldn’t attract much more eyeballs than a labouring Woods lashing golf balls into a giant screen amid dollops of contractually obliged bonhomie.
If that’s as good a summation of the NBA’s current problems as any, there are plenty more. Ratings for live matches across every channel are down 25 per cent on last season. The decline over the past decade is near double that. Amid constant complaints the 82-game regular season followed by two protracted months of play-offs is just too long, those in charge have tried to explain away vanishing viewers by citing the proliferation of streaming options, and the shrinking numbers watching television in general. These problems afflict all American sports except the untouchable juggernaut that is the NFL.
NBA suits are quick to tout a new broadcast rights deal worth $77 billion (€74 billion) across 11 years as evidence of its rude financial health. Aside from that sum being dwarfed by gridiron’s $110 billion over a similar duration for far fewer games, disillusioned basketball fans care less about money and more about the troubling evolution of the sport. Two decades ago, the average NBA game featured a total of 15 attempted three-point shots. In the opening match of this season, the reigning champion Boston Celtics launched 61 three-pointers, the last 13 of which were off-target, in a facile 132-109 victory over the New York Knicks. Last month, the Charlotte Hornets and the Chicago Bulls missed a combined 75 efforts from that distance in their ugly meeting at United Centre.
The long-distance sniper used to be a specialist position, perhaps best exemplified in his heyday by Steve Kerr, the crafty Bulls sharpshooter loitering with intent on the fringes of the action until opportunity knocked. Just about everybody can and does shoot from outside now. Like the upsurge in long-range points in intercounty hurling or the slavish devotion to playing out from the back in soccer, the game has fundamentally changed in a way not to everyone’s liking. The Celtics may well end this campaign having hoisted up more attempted three-pointers than twos.
“There’s a lot of f**king threes being shot,” said LeBron James last month when addressing issues facing the league.
Fans of a certain vintage are not thrilled to see lurching behemoths who traditionally made their living grappling under the basket pulling up to the arc and unfurling three-pointers. Sure, they’ve expanded their skill sets but the reduction in physical encounters in the paint has meant less rancour and a growing sense that players just don’t fight enough any more. Veterans of epic shemozzles from the 1980s and 1990s can be regularly found positing the softness theory on the airwaves and online. A view that dovetails with the increasingly popular opinion the stars are also way too fond of each other nowadays.
Those who watched or played in an era when there was genuine enmity between Larry Bird’s Celtics and Magic Johnson’s Lakers, or witnessed the Detroit Pistons brutally beating up on the young Michael Jordan, can’t stand the way the current crop fraternise with each other off and sometimes even on the court. The biggest names in the NBA routinely vacation or train together in the off-season and can often be found collaborating about which teams to join next. Is an absence of bad blood causing people to tune out? Nobody really knows.
A couple of years back, declining numbers were blamed on right-wingers eschewing the sport because James and others took principled stands on social justice issues. Kerr, now coaching the Golden State Warriors, and Gregg Popovich, his counterpart for the San Antonio Spurs, eloquently castigating Donald Trump were regarded as contributing factors too. But plenty of NFL players have taken outspoken moral stances on hot-button political issues and their television ratings never really budge.
With James and Steph Curry in the late autumn of their careers, the simplest explanation for diminishing viewership is that none of the next generation have stepped up to become the face of the league, the sort who transcends the sport like Kobe Bryant or Jordan. The Denver Nuggets’s Nikola Jokic might be the best player but often appears to have no interest in anything except getting back to Serbia to his beloved horses. While the Celtics’ Jayson Tatum and the Oklahoma Thunder’s Shai Gilgeous-Alexander are among those who occasionally look capable of making the leap to true superstardom, the saviour of the NBA could yet turn out to be a student at Duke University.
At 18, Cooper Flagg is a 6ft 9in freshman forward who, midway through his first season of collegiate ball, is destined to be the number one pick in next June’s draft. A generational talent out of Maine, some already reckon he may have the same potential impact as Caitlin Clark has wrought on the WNBA and the Guardian described him as “the cold-ass white boy breaking the basketball discourse”. Great White Hope? Great White Hype? The NBA hopes people will tune in to find out.
