There is a saying in video games that, at high levels of play, players will optimize the fun out of the game. In some ways I think that is what we see in basketball in terms of the viewing experience. Free throws and 3s are efficient but not super fun to watch most of the time.
The best example of this is the shift in baseball. It started off as a awesome way to see teams be rewarded for intelligent analysis in data, but once everyone was doing it, it completely sucked the mid level offense out of the game, and eventually heavily restricting the shift was the right call to make to change the incentives of the rules.
Baseball and 3-point shooting are also similar in that the games have moved towards higher upside players but low success rates so the modal play is the offensive player failing.
Football has become more pass heavy but pass plays tend to be exciting and completion rates have been trending upward so there is less failure built in.
*As Andrei brought up it basketball's modal play is not an offensive failure unlike baseball. The shot chart has become devoid of big range and includes mostly high success rate dunks/layups and lower success rate 3s.
It’s not clear to me that baseball is actually optimizing runs scored, either. The launch angle revolution has dragged averages down so low and produced so many strikeouts (which do nothing to to score runs at all) that I wonder if going back to matching pitch path to bat path wouldn’t raise the scoring…look at the Oklahoma Sooners softball program. That seems much more optimal!
There was an article some time back (not sure how to search for it) about how baseball had solved the question of how to win games so well that it was at risk of losing the larger, meta-game: how to be entertaining.
The people who say this about the 3 point shot either don’t really remember basketball or overly idealize it. So much of the old league features poor shooters who were forced “defend” artificially spread the game and make it uglier. More recently watch the Dirk-LeBron NBA finals in which both teams choked off the 2 point lane which is really why NBA teams shoot so much threes because it’s really the only way teams can open the shooting lanes. Seriously watch the 2011 NBA finals one year in which only one game featured both teams cracking 100 points for a game (and 2 games in which neither team broke 90 points). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_NBA_Finals
The NBA has been very popular when certain transcendent talents like bird, magic, Jordan, curry, and lebron showed up, maybe to a certain degree Kobe but absent those years the league has been more niche.
I would add: it is too hard to watch your local team’s games. Regional sports networks require their own streaming subscription and are a terrible product (the Ballys streaming service was regularly down for no reason, if the game ends while you’re streaming on delay, the stream just ends). I think the league will miss having “no marginal cost” local game viewing on cable or over the air TV because they are not making new fans. Like how high cigarette taxes affect youth uptake of smoking.
Sure. Not exactly a “loss leader” though. But now I’m being one of those “don’t wanna be wrong on the internet” people so let’s just call it a night. Happy almost Monday, folks.
I agree that this is a huge deal. Getting new fans is really important so making games available on broadcast and/or having it be relatively inexpensive to go to games is really important. Football has kept the former, but everyone has lost the latter.
I’m particularly interested in whether the crapshoot nature of the baseball playoffs leads to the league’s most marketable stars being on the sidelines of the World Series too often.
A great pitcher is worth less WAR than a great batter. I don't think it's a pitcher's sport. If anything, with the increase in bullpen size, it's less of a pitcher's sport than ever. Too many good pitchers!
Sure, because a batter plays every game, while a pitcher only plays every couple of games. But having three great pitchers gets you way further than having three great batters.
More significantly, most baseball actions are done individually. Pitching, hitting, catching a fly ball. There are occasional double plays, or throws home, etc. but those are exciting exceptions rather than the norm to every play.
Contrast with football where every play you have the line, quarterback, running back, receivers, etc. all working together to create an advantage and exploit it, or trying to make sure the other team doesn't.
Basketball is more of the middle where you can have iso plays (which only work because other members of the team are holding defenders in place), but the standard is some type of screening action where you have team mates working to create an advantage and the defense trying to work together to negate that.
MLB has challenges indeed but I appreciate that despite its history it has been willing to make some significant changes -- shift, pitch clock, NL DH -- to try to remedy them.
The first thing I thought of was how the NFL still dominates viewership. It has some innate features that make it ideal for TV, but one aspect is that the schedule is regular and rarer. You always know that Sundays in the autumn and most of the winter are for football, as well as regular games on Monday and Thursday night. And by having only 16 or 17 (maybe 18 soon?) games, each game holds much more meaning, making things like load management completely unfeasible in order to be competitive.
I don't know how far the NBA can shorten its schedule to make the money work, but my first instinct is the same as Bo's much more succinct comment.
1- the NFL knows how to start a game on time. The NBA doesn’t. A 1:15 nfl game starts at 1:15. A 7:30 nba game is getting ramped up at 7:50. That adds up, especially in a world of options.
2- NBA game times are absurd. My seven year old was interested in the playoffs this year but basically watched none because they were all starting after his bedtime. He got really into football because the games are played at times when children are conscious.
The playoff start times are infuriating as an east coaster. The NBA has clearly decided that the east coast should have to stay up until incredibly late to catch THE END of games rather than making the west coast have to consider missing THE START of games during workdays, which I think makes no sense- given the option, as a fan, I'd much rather miss the first 30 minutes of a game than the last 30.
But it's even worse on the Sunday games where you could easily start them at 6:00 PM EST and have everyone in America be able to easily watch them, but instead they still start super late and I have to decide if I want to be exhausted at the office on Monday or miss the potentially exciting end of a close game.
I think you need to evaluate WHY the NFL has the schedule it does- it's not like they've decided to play 16/17/18 games because they think that you want to create scarcity. They don't play less than 20 games because that's what maximizes their popularity. They play that many because that's encroaching on how many games are physically possible. Like you said, there is already talk of going to 18 games- that's because the NFL is trying to play the maximum number of games they possibly can. It just so happens the sport is so intense that the number just so happens to be low. But they're trying to play as many as possible, AS OFTEN as possible. Many weeks of the season have games on Sunday, Monday, Thursday, and Saturday.
The underlying economics of it make it pretty clear why too. If you play too many games you may lose a small percentage of fans (with the number becoming larger the more you get). But you get the revenue of the extra game, which more than makes up for the lower viewership for each individual game. Every change the NFL is currently considering involves playing more games on more days to try and saturate the marketplace as much as they can without completely destroying every player's body (they're happy to destroy many players' bodies, and certainly more than would be destroyed via a 16 or 10 or 8 game schedule, but they know if they push too hard they'd reach a cliff where so many stars would be hurt so often that the product would truly suffer).
I don't think this is a workable idea. I tend to think the season is too long myself. But the league wouldn't contemplate any shortening impactful enough to make a difference. I mean, moving to 78 games doesn't get us very far. And moving to 62 games? I don't see it. Maybe rating would improve, but there'd be less product to sell. Also, if distribution issues are the heart of the problem, it's hard to see what reducing the number of games is going to accomplish in any event.
The NBA has been caught off guard in a rapidly changing distribution environment (the shift from cable to streaming) that they haven't negotiated very skillfully. A big part of the reason, as Ben points out, appears to be they've been blinded by today's fat profits.
It is worth mentioning that the last two finals matchups included one team that people sort of didn't expect to be there and basically were just overmatched.
I'm a pretty diehard NBA fan, so I am not sure where you're coming up with this notion that "Regular" NBA fans didn't like those series. Once GSW got KD it became less interesting, but those first 2 finals between the Cavs and Warriors were highly anticipated, even by more diehard fans. Especially the 73 win GSW vs. the Cavs- that was arguably the greatest finals in history, and remains beloved and talked about by hardcore fans to this day. The 2010s was an incredibly exciting time to be a hardcore fan of the league, with a tremendous number of great stories and lots of incredible matchups. OKC before they lost KD, Houston trying to unseat GSW (and almost succeeding), Miami at the beginning of the decade and Lebron's incredible dominance, the end of TD and the Spurs but the rise of Kawhi, etc. etc. etc.
Regular fans, en masse, may have hated the GSW and wanted to see them knocked off (a debatable proposition given how popular Curry was and is, but certainly one I'm fine with since I hated those teams ;)), but to claim that regular fans hated the era entirely strikes me as a wild claim.
People forget how overmatched Cleveland was in 2015 with Love out of the first round and Irving out after the first round, but yeah, the Curry Warriors were I believe the most popular finals since Jordan retired in 1998. That’s why it’s kind of wrong to forget how popular the LeBron/Curry teams were, and somehow act like the last group of teams weren’t popular compared to other eras.
I do wonder what sort of basketball a lot of the grumpy fans of today are expected and want. Do they want to go back to the illegal defense days or something? Do they not understand teams are shooting 3s are much because of a need for spacing as it a desire to shot more actual 3 point shots?
Yeah, i'm wondering how much nostalgia from the dead ball era of basketball comes from actually watching the whole games and not just highlights. Do people really get a kick out of Slava Medvevenko 20 foot 2-pointers? The finesse post game had largely gone out of favor since the league started allowing contact in post situations in the mid 70s- those post hooks were favored because the offensive player was not allowed to initiate contact in the slightest, once that was allowed and there was time to matriculate through, we started to see more drop steps and power moves because it wasn't an offensive foul any more.
Yep I completely agree. Do we really want the Antonio and Dale Davis era pacers?
To come up with a tangential but related topic but if you look at the 1980s NBA championships there were precisely good competitive championships in that decade (1984 and 1988) with most of the series featuring lopsided often banged up teams on the losing side.
I can never forget that 2015 finals. I have a good friend who is an obnoxious Warriors fan who still harps about how illegitimate the Raptors win was because KD was out (and he claims Klay was out the whole series when Klay was actually only out for one game and part of another), yet who thinks that the Warriors would have still beat a Cavs team that took them six without Kyrie OR Love. It's infuriating to me lol
I also think the legacy discussions mentioned elsewhere in this thread are super fascinating if Kyrie and Love are both healthy that year. The Warriors were better the following year and lost to the Cavs, and Lebron took them to 6 all by himself in 2015. If Lebron has another ring and that Warriors squad lost 2x in a row before KD then I think the way both of those teams and the way Lebron and Curry are discussed are drastically different.
lol I appreciate your take on your overly sensitive Warriors fan. I feel like we’ve grown somewhat past the whole legacy conversation, at least I hope we have. The notion that a player is like say Garnett wouldn’t have been one of the 2 or best players of his generation if he’d stayed in Minnesota all of his career and never gone to Boston is absurd.
There’s so much luck involved in winning a title. Injuries have almost played a big role.
Injuries badly hurt Curry in 2016. Imagine how Lebrons legacy plays plays out if curry isn’t hurt in 2016 but then if they win that year it’s hard to see Durant playing in golden state. Of course the great what if is Walton. It’s very easy to imagine Walton winning at least 3 titles in a row if he’d been healthy.
Ehh, Curry's production was similar in 15 vs. 16, but I also think it's a much bigger stretch to say that an injury someone can play with is impactful as an injury that literally keeps multiple guys off the court. I think Draymond being suspended and Lebron and Kyrie both playing out of their minds for four straight games is why that series went the way it did. Lots of guys are beat up, so deciding who was beat up enough to where their play influenced the outcome is just a lot harder to claim IMHO.
I think the legacy stuff is a lot more contested than you seem to. You can't watch coverage of the NBA or see a post on social media about basketball without people arguing about if Lebron is the GOAT in the comments, and the one thing that gets thrown out every single time it comes up is that Lebron is 4 and 6 in the finals. I think those discussion are a lot different if he's 5-5 with four of the losses coming to either Tim Duncan's Spurs or KD and Curry's Warriors. I would like for us to have moved beyond the simple "just look at the wins" arguments and instead focus on more interesting and nuanced takes too, but I don't think most people have unfortunately.
Walton is such a fun discussion too, because he somehow managed to move beyond the pure wins discussion in a way no one else has, largely because of just how great he was. Lots of other guys aren't considered all time greats because they got hurt and never won (or never won enough). I think because he got the one ring and was so dominant people (correctly) give him the benefit of the doubt and acknowledge that he would have been an absolute monster for years without the injuries.
Is it a problem that Wemby is so tall? My assumption is it's easier for fans to become emotionally invested in players who are perceived as skillful rather than just bigger/taller than everybody else. Wilt Chamberlain supposedly experienced this.
LeBron James appears to be one of the closest human approximations to a 40k Space Marine in terms of raw physical durability combined with tremendous athleticism and being built like a human tank.
Wilt Chamberlain wasn't particularly likeable and unlike Jordan, Russell, Bird, Magic, etc. didn't have an indomitable will to win. Wemby seems to have fight in him and is pretty likeable OTOH. My concern with his height is that people who are that tall have a terrible record with injuries in the league.
He seems pretty media savvy. And he's good for the NBA's international viewership. And he looks like he's going to be a truly spectacular player, so...
Cavs and Warriors were popular because it was arguably the two most popular players since Jordan. The actual series were 4-2, 4-3, 4-1, 4-0. Except for 2016, none of their finals were really close. (LeBron put in an heroic performance in the 2015 the cavaliers were both without Kyrie after game one and Love for the whole series the Cavaliers really didn’t have much of a chance in the 2015 finals)
I am of the opinion that the solution to most problems of declining viewership is getting more people to attend live events. Fans are aging and new ones aren't being created as at high number. I think going to games increases the number that will become fans and watch on TV.
I think each team should have a few thousand seats available for each game at a ridiculously low price of like5 dollars each. If you are a family you need four tickets (and four meals and parking, etc) the cost is a disincentive. Now lots of teams have really great deals, but you have to click through deals pages or codes, they are only for certain games, etc. if I can just go to the purchase single game tickets and buy a five dollar ticket, I would do it more.
Unfortunately, the market will always find a way to dictate this somehow. Matt's been convincing recently that entertainment providers need to set market clearing prices, or otherwise rent seeking middlemen will do it for them.
I think this is a take I’ve never fully agreed with and that it might be better to crack down harder on the middlemen and offer an affordable product in order to build more reliable fans. I go to maybe one or two baseball games a season despite being a big fan, because the cost of getting the family out makes it a major event. The proliferation of middle men makes me less likely to go, not more, because the variety of ticket buying options (Stubhub, etc.) is paralyzing.
Tom, I’m with you on this. I get the cold logic of surrendering to “market clearing prices” but it feels like a way to ensure major concerts, sporting events are only for the rich. Supply of quality seats is sooo constrained, especially for concerts. And demand is extremely inelastic. (I’m throwing around words from my one year of college economics, go easy on me…)
One idea someone proposed in the comments of that Matt article that I liked is setting the base price that suppliers want to charge them, then add in deposits that can go to the highest bidder, but the deposit amount is returned to the end consumer upon attendance. This meets the goals of suppliers charging only the price they're comfortable with, while also taking down middlemen, and also avoid more effective altruist takes like "that money would be better off going to charities that do good". Only drawback I can see would be people taking out loans to get the deposit money at the highest levels, so you might still have some smaller middleman action reaping interest.
You can avoid this easy enough. Scalpers don't want crap seats which are the ones I am talking about. You can sell a ticket that requires a pick up at will call with an ID or something.
Yes you need a market clearing price for your good seats.
I’m not sure that attending a live sporting dven with a crap seat is actually a more fun use of a young potential fan’s time than playing Fortnite or whatever.
But it's more likely to make them a fan of the sport. The kid who would rather play fortnite isnt going to become a dedicated fan anyway. Maybe most kids who go to the game aren't going to become a hardcore fan, but some will who wouldn't otherwise if they only watch on tv.
The NBA has really made the in-game experience worse too. It used to be that you could go to a game and actually watch AND HEAR the game. They'd play music between plays or during timeouts, but otherwise you could watch the game and focus exclusively on that. Nowadays, they're blasting music and DJing the entire time, so if you see something and want to comment to your seatmate or call out to the players you're dealing with a cacophony of sound that is simply deadening. I have no idea who this change was for, but it seems universal, so every team has decided that this is the ideal fan experience, but it makes my enjoyment significantly less than it used to be.
I agree, but am reminded that its not even the tickets so much as everything else that's expensive. I got free tickets to a baseball game a while back to take the family to, but still spent a pretty sizable chunk of money after parking and a round of drinks and snacks.
Augusta National Golf Club is famous for keeping its concessions super cheap for The Masters. They are obviously sui generis, but the owner of the nearby Atlanta Falcons instituted the same policy when their new stadium was built.
That's really cool. I used to go for cheap in college on my own. Took the family since I got free tickets thinking it would be a fun and inexpensive evening and if they liked it we would go back more. It was fun, but I hadn't adjusted for prices and the difference between buying for one and buying for 4. What used to be a $30 outing for me, turned into a couple hundred.* Which isn't the worst thing in the world, but puts in the something we maybe do a couple of times a year instead of a 10-20 times a year.
*to be fair, I got one drink and parked in the boonies. The fam wants to park close and have lots of snacks.
Just took a look at the ticket prices for upcoming Rockies games, and...yeesh, as low as $10, and most of the available seats aren't in the triple digits. The Monforts are an absolute disgrace to Denver sports.
The article takes it as a foregone conclusion that MLB is in terminal decline and that the NBA is the second most popular sport (vs MLB at third) without providing any evidence. I think the evidence is at best mixed on both these claims. I’d think a Slow Boring post would recognize the danger of this (lots of well educated media types love the NBA and not MLB despite certain baseball team’s immense popularity in their local markets).
I think the broader trend is clearer - it’s the NFL’s world, and the rest of the sports leagues (and content generally) are just living in it. Misdiagnosing why this is happening (and I’m not saying I know) might lead a league to try to emulate the NFL (and fail) vs leaning into where it is successful (local popularity, lots of games, international markets, etc.).
Age-wise it's clear that the NBA is second. Among my peers I know essentially nobody who prefers baseball to basketball. Even my one good friend who used to has now become more of a soccer fan instead.
I am 18 and I agree with you on this but… almost everybody I know has been to a baseball game before. It’s a popular activity. In comparison very few have gone to a real basketball game.
There’s certainly more interest interest in the nba but I feel like trading TikTok highlight watchers for paying attendees is a trade the mlb is happy to make.
I came to post this. It is not at all clear to me that MLB is behind the NBA in any meaningful way - basketball players are obviously much more popular, and ratings for individual games are higher, but baseball still makes tons of money because they have so many games for people to buy tickets to and for TV networks to program with desirable live content. They face the same structural problems, and IDK what indicates baseball to be worse off.
Biggest issue for me with basketball is the absurd start-times for East coast viewers, and total disregard for people’s schedules. This year we had 8pm weekday or 8:30pm weekend starts, making it basically impossible for kids to stay up late to watch. This year we had game 1 on a Thursday, then game 2 on a Sunday late start. Are you kidding me? Why not Friday/Saturday games if you’re going to start so late? Also worth noting that the Superbowl, which doesn’t lack for ratings, consistently starts at 6:30pm ET.
I'm renowned on this site for complaining about the comment sections opening up here at 3 AM/4 AM here out west, but under no circumstances would I ever trade away reasonable start times for prime time sports games out here.
And the Super Bowl is able to air at 6:30 PM ET because they don't have other games to show alongside. During the regular season, prime time NFL games are regularly at 8:20 PM. My understanding why is that ads sell better at the beginning of the games because there's more consistency with viewership, while the end of the game can have high variance depending on whether it's a close game or a blowout. Thus, they want to make sure that all the Western eyeballs can see the early game and its ads after most are done with work.
The NBA is in this weird space where people seem to be spending more time consuming content about it (podcasts, sports talk shows) than watching the actual games.
Yeah I did find the argument that it was “silly” that they were competing a bit odd. Like, has attention for entertainment media suddently stopped being fungible?
This seems to take for granted that the NBA has some serious problem, when as the article points out the challenges are 100% structural and not NBA related at all. No one is replicating Thursday night NBC viewership numbers either, but that's not because TV execs have done something wrong -- that's just never going to happen again.
I mean the nfl and soccer seem to be avoiding this fate and remaining mass market at similar levels. Baseball and basketball seem to be on the other side of the divide and it’s not clear to me why basketball became more niche where both footballs didn’t.
I think you're right. I'm a big NFL fan and follow it every week of the season, but I'll generally only watch the playoffs of most other major sports. There's just too much other entertainment I want to consume to commit to following 82 basketball games or 162 baseball games.
To me, someone with only marginal interest in pro basketball, the biggest factor in the decision to skip watching games is the ready availability of highlight videos. IMO the most exciting NBA moments are fantastic passes, and there are countless Dončić and Jokić supercuts right there on YouTube.
> The NBA should focus on increasing the popularity of its regular season. And the only way to do that is by indulging in some experimentation to make the product more entertaining.
This doesn’t properly address the problem as stated. Your view is that the NBA now has to compete with tons of on-demand options. So it’s not that the product got worse - it’s that the distribution mechanism is outdated. Why not offer a league-pass-light for casual fans? Maybe via integration with an existing streaming platform? If I could add 5 bucks to my netflix subscription cost for some NBA games I’d probably do it. (Surely the standard answer is that this would cause attrition to other distribution channels resulting in a net loss, but if you’re right, then we arectrading short term profits for long term decline.)
Yeah, the biggest reason why I haven't watched as much basketball over the past 13 years is that I stopped paying for cable then. I couldn't even find the games of my favorite baseball team on cable most of the time when I was paying (and they've been one of the better teams of the past 20 years). And I'm an older millennial, not even a zoomer. Most sports leagues have done nothing to improve their distribution to cable cutters, except for that weird NFL Amazon deal for Thursday night football, which is a joke.
This short-term vs. long-term reminds of the NFL and Direct TV Sunday Ticket. In return for a payday, NFL owners told fans, "we're not going to make it easier to buy our product, we're going to force you to make a specific selection in an unrelated area of your budget in order to see your hometown team (if you no longer live there)." Always pissed me off. At least with YouTube TV, I don't have to buy a freaking dish (though I assume they will try to find ways to squeeze me into getting the bigger bundle).
I don't have a problem with paying a premium for Sunday Ticket, but having to financially chain yourself to a whole provider, and physically chain a dish to your house, was beyond the pale.
There is a saying in video games that, at high levels of play, players will optimize the fun out of the game. In some ways I think that is what we see in basketball in terms of the viewing experience. Free throws and 3s are efficient but not super fun to watch most of the time.
The best example of this is the shift in baseball. It started off as a awesome way to see teams be rewarded for intelligent analysis in data, but once everyone was doing it, it completely sucked the mid level offense out of the game, and eventually heavily restricting the shift was the right call to make to change the incentives of the rules.
Baseball is a great example too.
Baseball and 3-point shooting are also similar in that the games have moved towards higher upside players but low success rates so the modal play is the offensive player failing.
Football has become more pass heavy but pass plays tend to be exciting and completion rates have been trending upward so there is less failure built in.
*As Andrei brought up it basketball's modal play is not an offensive failure unlike baseball. The shot chart has become devoid of big range and includes mostly high success rate dunks/layups and lower success rate 3s.
It’s not clear to me that baseball is actually optimizing runs scored, either. The launch angle revolution has dragged averages down so low and produced so many strikeouts (which do nothing to to score runs at all) that I wonder if going back to matching pitch path to bat path wouldn’t raise the scoring…look at the Oklahoma Sooners softball program. That seems much more optimal!
I think this ignores the nature of the shots and fouls.
The FG% data you linked doesn't seem to back up your conclusion.
There was an article some time back (not sure how to search for it) about how baseball had solved the question of how to win games so well that it was at risk of losing the larger, meta-game: how to be entertaining.
The people who say this about the 3 point shot either don’t really remember basketball or overly idealize it. So much of the old league features poor shooters who were forced “defend” artificially spread the game and make it uglier. More recently watch the Dirk-LeBron NBA finals in which both teams choked off the 2 point lane which is really why NBA teams shoot so much threes because it’s really the only way teams can open the shooting lanes. Seriously watch the 2011 NBA finals one year in which only one game featured both teams cracking 100 points for a game (and 2 games in which neither team broke 90 points). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_NBA_Finals
The NBA has been very popular when certain transcendent talents like bird, magic, Jordan, curry, and lebron showed up, maybe to a certain degree Kobe but absent those years the league has been more niche.
I would add: it is too hard to watch your local team’s games. Regional sports networks require their own streaming subscription and are a terrible product (the Ballys streaming service was regularly down for no reason, if the game ends while you’re streaming on delay, the stream just ends). I think the league will miss having “no marginal cost” local game viewing on cable or over the air TV because they are not making new fans. Like how high cigarette taxes affect youth uptake of smoking.
The NFL is in such a good place in this regard that they've always aired local games in local markets for free as a loss leader.
There was a time in the 90s when the Raiders were in Oakland where their games kept being blacked out because there were still tickets available.
Free? Don't Fox/CBS etc. pay handsomely for those rights?
Free for the viewers in the local markets, of course.
The key idea here is “at zero marginal cost the a viewer who has cable or an arial antenna“
Sure. Not exactly a “loss leader” though. But now I’m being one of those “don’t wanna be wrong on the internet” people so let’s just call it a night. Happy almost Monday, folks.
I agree that this is a huge deal. Getting new fans is really important so making games available on broadcast and/or having it be relatively inexpensive to go to games is really important. Football has kept the former, but everyone has lost the latter.
Some are moving towards this:
https://www.azfamily.com/programming/sports-network/
Would love to see an article like this for baseball—a sport with big structural problems as well.
I’m particularly interested in whether the crapshoot nature of the baseball playoffs leads to the league’s most marketable stars being on the sidelines of the World Series too often.
Not just that, a star can't carry a team in baseball. See Mike Trout.
Baseball is a team sport. Basketball is a star (or two-star) driven sport. Football is a happy medium.
I dunno, I don't think of baseball being a team sport so much as a pitchers sport.
Basketball needs stars, but the finals this year showed that even having stars is not enough if you don't have the surrounding talent.
A great pitcher is worth less WAR than a great batter. I don't think it's a pitcher's sport. If anything, with the increase in bullpen size, it's less of a pitcher's sport than ever. Too many good pitchers!
Sure, because a batter plays every game, while a pitcher only plays every couple of games. But having three great pitchers gets you way further than having three great batters.
More significantly, most baseball actions are done individually. Pitching, hitting, catching a fly ball. There are occasional double plays, or throws home, etc. but those are exciting exceptions rather than the norm to every play.
Contrast with football where every play you have the line, quarterback, running back, receivers, etc. all working together to create an advantage and exploit it, or trying to make sure the other team doesn't.
Basketball is more of the middle where you can have iso plays (which only work because other members of the team are holding defenders in place), but the standard is some type of screening action where you have team mates working to create an advantage and the defense trying to work together to negate that.
I'm eager to see if the new rules changes will lighten up some of the structural burdens in the coming seasons.
MLB has challenges indeed but I appreciate that despite its history it has been willing to make some significant changes -- shift, pitch clock, NL DH -- to try to remedy them.
Baseball is a sport played in a button down, its wild that it has remained popular for this long.
The first thing I thought of was how the NFL still dominates viewership. It has some innate features that make it ideal for TV, but one aspect is that the schedule is regular and rarer. You always know that Sundays in the autumn and most of the winter are for football, as well as regular games on Monday and Thursday night. And by having only 16 or 17 (maybe 18 soon?) games, each game holds much more meaning, making things like load management completely unfeasible in order to be competitive.
I don't know how far the NBA can shorten its schedule to make the money work, but my first instinct is the same as Bo's much more succinct comment.
Absolutely. Two smaller additions
1- the NFL knows how to start a game on time. The NBA doesn’t. A 1:15 nfl game starts at 1:15. A 7:30 nba game is getting ramped up at 7:50. That adds up, especially in a world of options.
2- NBA game times are absurd. My seven year old was interested in the playoffs this year but basically watched none because they were all starting after his bedtime. He got really into football because the games are played at times when children are conscious.
The playoff start times are infuriating as an east coaster. The NBA has clearly decided that the east coast should have to stay up until incredibly late to catch THE END of games rather than making the west coast have to consider missing THE START of games during workdays, which I think makes no sense- given the option, as a fan, I'd much rather miss the first 30 minutes of a game than the last 30.
But it's even worse on the Sunday games where you could easily start them at 6:00 PM EST and have everyone in America be able to easily watch them, but instead they still start super late and I have to decide if I want to be exhausted at the office on Monday or miss the potentially exciting end of a close game.
At least they start before 9 now.
It is annoying for us East Coasters but they also do need to make it watchable for West Coasters too. Starting before 5 PM PST would just not work.
I think you need to evaluate WHY the NFL has the schedule it does- it's not like they've decided to play 16/17/18 games because they think that you want to create scarcity. They don't play less than 20 games because that's what maximizes their popularity. They play that many because that's encroaching on how many games are physically possible. Like you said, there is already talk of going to 18 games- that's because the NFL is trying to play the maximum number of games they possibly can. It just so happens the sport is so intense that the number just so happens to be low. But they're trying to play as many as possible, AS OFTEN as possible. Many weeks of the season have games on Sunday, Monday, Thursday, and Saturday.
The underlying economics of it make it pretty clear why too. If you play too many games you may lose a small percentage of fans (with the number becoming larger the more you get). But you get the revenue of the extra game, which more than makes up for the lower viewership for each individual game. Every change the NFL is currently considering involves playing more games on more days to try and saturate the marketplace as much as they can without completely destroying every player's body (they're happy to destroy many players' bodies, and certainly more than would be destroyed via a 16 or 10 or 8 game schedule, but they know if they push too hard they'd reach a cliff where so many stars would be hurt so often that the product would truly suffer).
I don't think this is a workable idea. I tend to think the season is too long myself. But the league wouldn't contemplate any shortening impactful enough to make a difference. I mean, moving to 78 games doesn't get us very far. And moving to 62 games? I don't see it. Maybe rating would improve, but there'd be less product to sell. Also, if distribution issues are the heart of the problem, it's hard to see what reducing the number of games is going to accomplish in any event.
The NBA has been caught off guard in a rapidly changing distribution environment (the shift from cable to streaming) that they haven't negotiated very skillfully. A big part of the reason, as Ben points out, appears to be they've been blinded by today's fat profits.
I went to a regular season NBA game a few years ago. Kind of boring and for half the game neither side played defense. Haven’t been back since.
It is worth mentioning that the last two finals matchups included one team that people sort of didn't expect to be there and basically were just overmatched.
I'm a pretty diehard NBA fan, so I am not sure where you're coming up with this notion that "Regular" NBA fans didn't like those series. Once GSW got KD it became less interesting, but those first 2 finals between the Cavs and Warriors were highly anticipated, even by more diehard fans. Especially the 73 win GSW vs. the Cavs- that was arguably the greatest finals in history, and remains beloved and talked about by hardcore fans to this day. The 2010s was an incredibly exciting time to be a hardcore fan of the league, with a tremendous number of great stories and lots of incredible matchups. OKC before they lost KD, Houston trying to unseat GSW (and almost succeeding), Miami at the beginning of the decade and Lebron's incredible dominance, the end of TD and the Spurs but the rise of Kawhi, etc. etc. etc.
Regular fans, en masse, may have hated the GSW and wanted to see them knocked off (a debatable proposition given how popular Curry was and is, but certainly one I'm fine with since I hated those teams ;)), but to claim that regular fans hated the era entirely strikes me as a wild claim.
People forget how overmatched Cleveland was in 2015 with Love out of the first round and Irving out after the first round, but yeah, the Curry Warriors were I believe the most popular finals since Jordan retired in 1998. That’s why it’s kind of wrong to forget how popular the LeBron/Curry teams were, and somehow act like the last group of teams weren’t popular compared to other eras.
I do wonder what sort of basketball a lot of the grumpy fans of today are expected and want. Do they want to go back to the illegal defense days or something? Do they not understand teams are shooting 3s are much because of a need for spacing as it a desire to shot more actual 3 point shots?
Yeah, i'm wondering how much nostalgia from the dead ball era of basketball comes from actually watching the whole games and not just highlights. Do people really get a kick out of Slava Medvevenko 20 foot 2-pointers? The finesse post game had largely gone out of favor since the league started allowing contact in post situations in the mid 70s- those post hooks were favored because the offensive player was not allowed to initiate contact in the slightest, once that was allowed and there was time to matriculate through, we started to see more drop steps and power moves because it wasn't an offensive foul any more.
Yep I completely agree. Do we really want the Antonio and Dale Davis era pacers?
To come up with a tangential but related topic but if you look at the 1980s NBA championships there were precisely good competitive championships in that decade (1984 and 1988) with most of the series featuring lopsided often banged up teams on the losing side.
I can never forget that 2015 finals. I have a good friend who is an obnoxious Warriors fan who still harps about how illegitimate the Raptors win was because KD was out (and he claims Klay was out the whole series when Klay was actually only out for one game and part of another), yet who thinks that the Warriors would have still beat a Cavs team that took them six without Kyrie OR Love. It's infuriating to me lol
I also think the legacy discussions mentioned elsewhere in this thread are super fascinating if Kyrie and Love are both healthy that year. The Warriors were better the following year and lost to the Cavs, and Lebron took them to 6 all by himself in 2015. If Lebron has another ring and that Warriors squad lost 2x in a row before KD then I think the way both of those teams and the way Lebron and Curry are discussed are drastically different.
lol I appreciate your take on your overly sensitive Warriors fan. I feel like we’ve grown somewhat past the whole legacy conversation, at least I hope we have. The notion that a player is like say Garnett wouldn’t have been one of the 2 or best players of his generation if he’d stayed in Minnesota all of his career and never gone to Boston is absurd.
There’s so much luck involved in winning a title. Injuries have almost played a big role.
Injuries badly hurt Curry in 2016. Imagine how Lebrons legacy plays plays out if curry isn’t hurt in 2016 but then if they win that year it’s hard to see Durant playing in golden state. Of course the great what if is Walton. It’s very easy to imagine Walton winning at least 3 titles in a row if he’d been healthy.
Ehh, Curry's production was similar in 15 vs. 16, but I also think it's a much bigger stretch to say that an injury someone can play with is impactful as an injury that literally keeps multiple guys off the court. I think Draymond being suspended and Lebron and Kyrie both playing out of their minds for four straight games is why that series went the way it did. Lots of guys are beat up, so deciding who was beat up enough to where their play influenced the outcome is just a lot harder to claim IMHO.
I think the legacy stuff is a lot more contested than you seem to. You can't watch coverage of the NBA or see a post on social media about basketball without people arguing about if Lebron is the GOAT in the comments, and the one thing that gets thrown out every single time it comes up is that Lebron is 4 and 6 in the finals. I think those discussion are a lot different if he's 5-5 with four of the losses coming to either Tim Duncan's Spurs or KD and Curry's Warriors. I would like for us to have moved beyond the simple "just look at the wins" arguments and instead focus on more interesting and nuanced takes too, but I don't think most people have unfortunately.
Walton is such a fun discussion too, because he somehow managed to move beyond the pure wins discussion in a way no one else has, largely because of just how great he was. Lots of other guys aren't considered all time greats because they got hurt and never won (or never won enough). I think because he got the one ring and was so dominant people (correctly) give him the benefit of the doubt and acknowledge that he would have been an absolute monster for years without the injuries.
Also Tatum has 7m on IG, Butler has 10m, Luka has 9m. Jokic doesn't seem to have one.
Curry has 56m and Lebron has 150m
Jokic not having an Insta is just perfect.
Is it a problem that Wemby is so tall? My assumption is it's easier for fans to become emotionally invested in players who are perceived as skillful rather than just bigger/taller than everybody else. Wilt Chamberlain supposedly experienced this.
Lebron James is a cybernetic creature from the future sent back to dominate basketball for 20 years and seems to be relatively popular.
LeBron James appears to be one of the closest human approximations to a 40k Space Marine in terms of raw physical durability combined with tremendous athleticism and being built like a human tank.
Wilt Chamberlain wasn't particularly likeable and unlike Jordan, Russell, Bird, Magic, etc. didn't have an indomitable will to win. Wemby seems to have fight in him and is pretty likeable OTOH. My concern with his height is that people who are that tall have a terrible record with injuries in the league.
He seems pretty media savvy. And he's good for the NBA's international viewership. And he looks like he's going to be a truly spectacular player, so...
Wemby is phenomenally talented and incredibly skilled.
There's a kid from Quebec who'll be playing college for Florida this fall. I've seen him listed at both 7'7" and 7'9". He's still growing.
I'm still salty that Durant decided to join a 73-win team to chase a ring.
Cavs and Warriors were popular because it was arguably the two most popular players since Jordan. The actual series were 4-2, 4-3, 4-1, 4-0. Except for 2016, none of their finals were really close. (LeBron put in an heroic performance in the 2015 the cavaliers were both without Kyrie after game one and Love for the whole series the Cavaliers really didn’t have much of a chance in the 2015 finals)
I am of the opinion that the solution to most problems of declining viewership is getting more people to attend live events. Fans are aging and new ones aren't being created as at high number. I think going to games increases the number that will become fans and watch on TV.
I think each team should have a few thousand seats available for each game at a ridiculously low price of like5 dollars each. If you are a family you need four tickets (and four meals and parking, etc) the cost is a disincentive. Now lots of teams have really great deals, but you have to click through deals pages or codes, they are only for certain games, etc. if I can just go to the purchase single game tickets and buy a five dollar ticket, I would do it more.
Unfortunately, the market will always find a way to dictate this somehow. Matt's been convincing recently that entertainment providers need to set market clearing prices, or otherwise rent seeking middlemen will do it for them.
I think this is a take I’ve never fully agreed with and that it might be better to crack down harder on the middlemen and offer an affordable product in order to build more reliable fans. I go to maybe one or two baseball games a season despite being a big fan, because the cost of getting the family out makes it a major event. The proliferation of middle men makes me less likely to go, not more, because the variety of ticket buying options (Stubhub, etc.) is paralyzing.
Tom, I’m with you on this. I get the cold logic of surrendering to “market clearing prices” but it feels like a way to ensure major concerts, sporting events are only for the rich. Supply of quality seats is sooo constrained, especially for concerts. And demand is extremely inelastic. (I’m throwing around words from my one year of college economics, go easy on me…)
One idea someone proposed in the comments of that Matt article that I liked is setting the base price that suppliers want to charge them, then add in deposits that can go to the highest bidder, but the deposit amount is returned to the end consumer upon attendance. This meets the goals of suppliers charging only the price they're comfortable with, while also taking down middlemen, and also avoid more effective altruist takes like "that money would be better off going to charities that do good". Only drawback I can see would be people taking out loans to get the deposit money at the highest levels, so you might still have some smaller middleman action reaping interest.
Interesting! Seems complicated but Ticketmaster pricing is already so much more complicated so maybe?
You can avoid this easy enough. Scalpers don't want crap seats which are the ones I am talking about. You can sell a ticket that requires a pick up at will call with an ID or something.
Yes you need a market clearing price for your good seats.
But sometimes there are no crap seats because the game is so highly desired.
I’m not sure that attending a live sporting dven with a crap seat is actually a more fun use of a young potential fan’s time than playing Fortnite or whatever.
But it's more likely to make them a fan of the sport. The kid who would rather play fortnite isnt going to become a dedicated fan anyway. Maybe most kids who go to the game aren't going to become a hardcore fan, but some will who wouldn't otherwise if they only watch on tv.
The NBA has really made the in-game experience worse too. It used to be that you could go to a game and actually watch AND HEAR the game. They'd play music between plays or during timeouts, but otherwise you could watch the game and focus exclusively on that. Nowadays, they're blasting music and DJing the entire time, so if you see something and want to comment to your seatmate or call out to the players you're dealing with a cacophony of sound that is simply deadening. I have no idea who this change was for, but it seems universal, so every team has decided that this is the ideal fan experience, but it makes my enjoyment significantly less than it used to be.
I agree, but am reminded that its not even the tickets so much as everything else that's expensive. I got free tickets to a baseball game a while back to take the family to, but still spent a pretty sizable chunk of money after parking and a round of drinks and snacks.
The Nationals are doing a thing where kids under 12 get a free hot dog, bag of chips and soda, which seems like a great idea.
Augusta National Golf Club is famous for keeping its concessions super cheap for The Masters. They are obviously sui generis, but the owner of the nearby Atlanta Falcons instituted the same policy when their new stadium was built.
That's really cool. I used to go for cheap in college on my own. Took the family since I got free tickets thinking it would be a fun and inexpensive evening and if they liked it we would go back more. It was fun, but I hadn't adjusted for prices and the difference between buying for one and buying for 4. What used to be a $30 outing for me, turned into a couple hundred.* Which isn't the worst thing in the world, but puts in the something we maybe do a couple of times a year instead of a 10-20 times a year.
*to be fair, I got one drink and parked in the boonies. The fam wants to park close and have lots of snacks.
Still, a couple hundred bucks - yikes
Yeah. That's pretty much how I felt about it at the end of the night.
Denver used to do the "Rock Pile" seating for Rockies' games like 20+ years ago for $5. I'm not sure how much effect it had on viewership though.
I attended $2 A's games in college about a decade ago. Didn't help people show up.
Just took a look at the ticket prices for upcoming Rockies games, and...yeesh, as low as $10, and most of the available seats aren't in the triple digits. The Monforts are an absolute disgrace to Denver sports.
The article takes it as a foregone conclusion that MLB is in terminal decline and that the NBA is the second most popular sport (vs MLB at third) without providing any evidence. I think the evidence is at best mixed on both these claims. I’d think a Slow Boring post would recognize the danger of this (lots of well educated media types love the NBA and not MLB despite certain baseball team’s immense popularity in their local markets).
I think the broader trend is clearer - it’s the NFL’s world, and the rest of the sports leagues (and content generally) are just living in it. Misdiagnosing why this is happening (and I’m not saying I know) might lead a league to try to emulate the NFL (and fail) vs leaning into where it is successful (local popularity, lots of games, international markets, etc.).
Age-wise it's clear that the NBA is second. Among my peers I know essentially nobody who prefers baseball to basketball. Even my one good friend who used to has now become more of a soccer fan instead.
The plural of "anecdote" is not "data."
I am 18 and I agree with you on this but… almost everybody I know has been to a baseball game before. It’s a popular activity. In comparison very few have gone to a real basketball game.
There’s certainly more interest interest in the nba but I feel like trading TikTok highlight watchers for paying attendees is a trade the mlb is happy to make.
I came to post this. It is not at all clear to me that MLB is behind the NBA in any meaningful way - basketball players are obviously much more popular, and ratings for individual games are higher, but baseball still makes tons of money because they have so many games for people to buy tickets to and for TV networks to program with desirable live content. They face the same structural problems, and IDK what indicates baseball to be worse off.
Biggest issue for me with basketball is the absurd start-times for East coast viewers, and total disregard for people’s schedules. This year we had 8pm weekday or 8:30pm weekend starts, making it basically impossible for kids to stay up late to watch. This year we had game 1 on a Thursday, then game 2 on a Sunday late start. Are you kidding me? Why not Friday/Saturday games if you’re going to start so late? Also worth noting that the Superbowl, which doesn’t lack for ratings, consistently starts at 6:30pm ET.
I'm renowned on this site for complaining about the comment sections opening up here at 3 AM/4 AM here out west, but under no circumstances would I ever trade away reasonable start times for prime time sports games out here.
And the Super Bowl is able to air at 6:30 PM ET because they don't have other games to show alongside. During the regular season, prime time NFL games are regularly at 8:20 PM. My understanding why is that ads sell better at the beginning of the games because there's more consistency with viewership, while the end of the game can have high variance depending on whether it's a close game or a blowout. Thus, they want to make sure that all the Western eyeballs can see the early game and its ads after most are done with work.
What’s wrong with an afternoon start for a weekend NBA finals game?
Nothing, because most people aren't working on the weekends.
The NBA is in this weird space where people seem to be spending more time consuming content about it (podcasts, sports talk shows) than watching the actual games.
The Stephen A. Smith effect. Why he is so popular is something I don't understand.
Here to say that I watched the Flemish rabbit video instead of NBA videos.
Yeah I did find the argument that it was “silly” that they were competing a bit odd. Like, has attention for entertainment media suddently stopped being fungible?
This seems to take for granted that the NBA has some serious problem, when as the article points out the challenges are 100% structural and not NBA related at all. No one is replicating Thursday night NBC viewership numbers either, but that's not because TV execs have done something wrong -- that's just never going to happen again.
I mean the nfl and soccer seem to be avoiding this fate and remaining mass market at similar levels. Baseball and basketball seem to be on the other side of the divide and it’s not clear to me why basketball became more niche where both footballs didn’t.
There is a very simple thing that the footballs have in common.
The games matter. Every game for most of the teams in the nfl or premier league can make a big difference.
Compare that to the nba.
I think you're right. I'm a big NFL fan and follow it every week of the season, but I'll generally only watch the playoffs of most other major sports. There's just too much other entertainment I want to consume to commit to following 82 basketball games or 162 baseball games.
To me, someone with only marginal interest in pro basketball, the biggest factor in the decision to skip watching games is the ready availability of highlight videos. IMO the most exciting NBA moments are fantastic passes, and there are countless Dončić and Jokić supercuts right there on YouTube.
> The NBA should focus on increasing the popularity of its regular season. And the only way to do that is by indulging in some experimentation to make the product more entertaining.
This doesn’t properly address the problem as stated. Your view is that the NBA now has to compete with tons of on-demand options. So it’s not that the product got worse - it’s that the distribution mechanism is outdated. Why not offer a league-pass-light for casual fans? Maybe via integration with an existing streaming platform? If I could add 5 bucks to my netflix subscription cost for some NBA games I’d probably do it. (Surely the standard answer is that this would cause attrition to other distribution channels resulting in a net loss, but if you’re right, then we arectrading short term profits for long term decline.)
Yeah, the biggest reason why I haven't watched as much basketball over the past 13 years is that I stopped paying for cable then. I couldn't even find the games of my favorite baseball team on cable most of the time when I was paying (and they've been one of the better teams of the past 20 years). And I'm an older millennial, not even a zoomer. Most sports leagues have done nothing to improve their distribution to cable cutters, except for that weird NFL Amazon deal for Thursday night football, which is a joke.
This short-term vs. long-term reminds of the NFL and Direct TV Sunday Ticket. In return for a payday, NFL owners told fans, "we're not going to make it easier to buy our product, we're going to force you to make a specific selection in an unrelated area of your budget in order to see your hometown team (if you no longer live there)." Always pissed me off. At least with YouTube TV, I don't have to buy a freaking dish (though I assume they will try to find ways to squeeze me into getting the bigger bundle).
I don't have a problem with paying a premium for Sunday Ticket, but having to financially chain yourself to a whole provider, and physically chain a dish to your house, was beyond the pale.
I see lots of commercials saying you don't need the dish anymore and can just stream it. No idea if that is a good product or not though.
I'm really, really happy that YouTube TV won NFL Sunday Ticket because I can do some really cool things on the browser with it. Always Use The Web™.
This is sort of the "Hulu Has Live Sports" thing but that was more expensive.
There's no such thing as European Premier League Soccer. You mean English Premier League Soccer or European Champions League Soccer
After the video of those giant rabbits, I found it hard to care about the NBA.
Too many games!