Sam Amico
Videos by OutKick
Pro basketball used to be strictly about the game. Now, it’s trying to be strictly about the game again (or so it says). But for the NBA, it may be too late.
After the league spent the end of last season mercilessly pushing far-left politics inside the Orlando bubble, it appears more than half of the NBA’s former audience is now missing. All you need to do is check the league’s historically low television ratings to know that. So when OutKick founder Clay Travis talks about the NBA, he almost has to laugh
“Our old friends at the NBA,” Clay begins his video segment while grinning. “The NBA is poised to hit an all-time low in television ratings, this year, playing a roughly equivalent and easy schedule that started later in the year and with fewer games, would theoretically lead to more national interest. Instead, the NBA brand has continued to plummet. The overall viewership for (NBA) games on TNT and ESPN is going to be down substantially.”
As Clay points out, this comes one season after the “blue-checkmark brigade” justified the league’s terrible ratings inside the bubble because games were being played in August and September. But this has actually been an ongoing trend.
“Since 2012, they have lost nearly half of their fans that were watching the games,” Clay says. “And I’m telling you what happened — the NBA got woke, and they have gotten broke. They told half the United States, ‘We don’t like you, and we don’t want you watching our product.’ And half the United States said, ‘Goodbye.'”
Clay goes on to discuss the NBA’s woke-to-broke fall from grace in further detail in the video below. Be sure to give it a watch.
Good. I hope it’ll be even lower so people move their franchises where the concentration camps are.
The NBA may not be circling the bowl – yet, but if all the pro leagues were queued up outside the single occupancy bathroom, it’s a gaar-on-teed 5-star lock that they’d be first on line.
I COULD start watching the NBA again, but they are such narcissists that I believe they will destroy the entire league vs admitting they were wrong about introducing politics into the league. I grew up watching Magic, Larry and Mike create a fun, entertaining game I would watch over anything else. I LOVED NBA basketball and everything associated with it? Now, I purposely turn the channel or the volume on my radio or TV if there is NBA talk. To be frank, the only reason I am commenting here is to illustrate the strength of Clay’s point on the NBA and provide another example of what he is talking about. The NBA can go away. I would rather watch anything else.
The Left is using illegal immigrants for their strategy of replacement voters and the NBA is all-in on using the Chinese and gamblers as their replacement fans.
There is an element of truth here
Well put.
Kobe was probably the last of the line when it came to the NBA I prefered to watch. NBA was dying before his helicopter crash but it seems the NBA also went into the coffin after he died.
Same here. When Kobe , Tim Duncan and other top players in the 1996-2016 era retired my interest went downhill. Once LeBron became the NBA’s leading race hustler, China hypocrisy was exposed, and BLM was glorified on the court, the hole in the league’s boat got too big to plug.
I got sick of being inundated with black culture and a left wing social agenda while watching games. That, in addition to their dislike of whites and our culture. Will never watch. Turned on a college game this year and saw Michigan with “ No Justice No Peace” on their warmups. That was it for me even watching college hoops.
Used to visit my local team a couple times a year. No more. Used to follow the Celtics rabidly. No more. Hopefully franchises start to fail and the league has salary cutting for all involved.
consumers hold the power—it just takes longer to get point across—once fans leave it almost impossible to get them back.
I don’t know about anyone else but the second a broadcasters start showing ‘woke’ BS, I change the channel. Happened during a recent NASCAR race. Happened last night watching a baseball game and some commercial came on with the pink-haired lesbian soccer player. You’d think they would care about driving away viewers….but apparently not.
It’s a cult. So they are oblivious.
Perhaps if the players started riots at the game, more interest would be drawn? For a minute, maybe. Or maybe not.
Good. The NBA will go to China, where it belongs.
When Larry, Magic, and Michael took the game globally (along with David Stern), they had no idea it would turn into this disaster. Greed is not good.