Thanks to “woke” NBA players like LeBron James it appears the NBA is as dead as the NFL to many Americans. They are choking on their political wokeness thinking they had a platform from which they could lecture us, but it is turning out that Americans have just turned them OFF, instead!
Get woke, go broke!
Maybe now they will learn the number one rule of free market capitalism…don’t insult your customer.
Instead of what the NBA thought would be great numbers of fans that they attracted to Game 1 Finals the NBA saw a catastrophic drop in both their ratings and viewership. Despite there being millions of sport watching fans at home in lockdown and LeBron James on the floor playing, not many showed up to watch.
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According to the Hollywood Reporter:
The opening game of the series between the Los Angeles Lakers and Miami Heat brought 7.41 million viewers to ABC, the smallest audience for the finals since at least 1994, when total viewers began to be regularly recorded. The previous low was 8.06 million for Game 3 of the 2007 NBA Finals.
The game, which took place about four months later than the usual start date for the NBA Finals, was down by about 45 percent in total viewers vs. the U.S. audience for last year’s finals opener between the Golden State Warriors and Toronto Raptors. The two conference finals series that wrapped up last week were down a collective 35 percent year to year. The NHL’s Stanley Cup Finals series, also delayed by several months, was down by more than 60 percent for NBC Sports. Major League Baseball has also struggled during its shortened season.
The massive decline in viewership and ratings are nothing too new to the NBA, they have seen the decline coming since the league restarted its season fully embracing social justice activism and with each measure they took to push their political agenda, they have seen drops in ratings.
This says alot about their fans who have been starving for sports for five months during the pandemic. Despite the sport withdrawals they have been going through, they still don’t want politics mixed in with what used to be their favorite pass time activity, something that took them out of the world not throw the world in their face and force them to inhale the political agenda of their favorite players.
It’s looking like much of the country if finding the NBA’s focus on politics a major turn off. A Harris poll that was conducted in September found that most fans were choosing to watch fewer fames because the NBA had become “too political”
The NBA has a ratings problem — it has for a while. Ratings for the first round of playoffs were down 27 percent from last season, according to reported Nielsen ratings, and down 40 percent from two years ago.
President Trump thinks he knows why, watch him here:
People are tired of watching the highly political @NBA. Basketball ratings are WAY down, and they won’t be coming back. I hope football and baseball are watching and learning because the same thing will be happening to them. Stand tall for our Country and our Flag!!!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 1, 2020
As reported by The Hill:
A Harris poll seemed to back his claims, reporting that 38 percent of nearly 2,000 people chose “The league has become too political” when given 10 choices on why they are watching less basketball. “Boring without fans” said another 28 percent, while 19 percent said it was the NBA’s association with China.
It’s hard to say what political means though. The poll also found 34 percent of Republicans say they “actively follow” the NBA, compared with 48 percent of Democrats — the largest such gap in any sport. And some say the poll doesn’t tell the whole story.
“There is no proper context to compare the current NBA viewership post-COVID to any regular season,” Tom McGovern, president of Omnicom Group’s sports media division Optimum Sports, told Variety. “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.”
Even before the coronavirus pandemic reached the United States and George Floyd’s death inspired protests across the nation, the NBA was in trouble. National television viewership had fallen 12 percent in February since the end of the season compared to the 2018-19 season, according to a report from Sports Business Daily.
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