The NBA is struggling mightily when it comes to TV ratings this season.
Nine games on TNT and ESPN through last Thursday failed to get at least a million viewers, according to SportsMediaWatch.com. Only 19 games failed to reach that mark all of last season.
The Lakers seem to be the one team that’s consistently pulling in big numbers. The same report claimed they’ve played in three of the top five biggest games so far this season. (RELATED: David Hookstead Is The True King In The North When It Comes To College Football)
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This isn’t a great look for the NBA at all. It’s never a good sign when you have primetime games on major networks that aren’t pulling in a ton of viewers.
There are plenty of random college football games that get more than a million viewers. There are games in college football that pass that benchmark with ease.
Yet, the NBA is struggling like hell to get people to pay attention.
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Now, I’m not going to sit here and try to draw a line between the issues with China and people not watching the NBA.
The two are most likely completely unrelated, or the China stuff has had an extremely minor impact. NBA viewership was down 26% early last season on TNT.
This isn’t a new trend. It just seems to be getting worse as more time goes by.
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The reality of the situation as I see it is pretty simple. The NBA regular season consists of an 82 game schedule. It’s really hard to get people to care for that much action.
It’s not like the NFL and college football, which both feature only a handful of games. People are going to care a hell of a lot more when every game matters a ton.
We’ll have to wait and see if Adam Silver can find a fix, but this isn’t exactly a new issue. The numbers haven’t been outstanding for awhile, and they’re likely never going to catch the ratings we see in the NFL and major college football.