The NBA is a sports league, but it’s also an entertainment product at its core. Like a soap opera, game show, sitcom, or podcast, the NBA’s success is determined by how many people watch it. It’s a sports league with associated journalism and media, but it’s also a television product – one with drama, storylines, ups, downs, heroes, and villains.
But people aren’t as captivated. NBA ratings were down 28% through the first month of the season. ESPN is pulling around 1.77 million per stand alone game after inking a 11-year, $76 billion deal with Disney, Comcast, and Amazon.
Why are the ratings down? Some of the problems are older and more known. The NBA has been called a few times to shorten the season – 82 games is a lot, and the more you have the less significant each one feels. It’s a lot of games condensed into a few months, which folds directly into the next problem: fatigue. Players are getting hurt for extended periods of time, prominent players. Stars like Joel Embiid, Kawhi Leonard, and Zion Williamson have had a minimal presence in the landscape of the NBA to this point and their biggest fans are less interested in the team-wide product as a result. Some of it has become the cousin of “rest” and “load management”, where players aren’t playing unless they’re 100% for personal reasons.
The message for this has been steady over a few years: if the players don’t take the regular season as seriously, the fans won’t either.
Play To Win On The Court And In The Office
The job of the general manager is different from the owner. The owner wants a lot of things to happen that all eventually lead to profitability in some way, shape, or form. The general manager’s only task if to win as many games as possible by fielding the best roster they can with the tools at their disposal.
Everyone has come around to realize how valuable the three-point shot is in the NBA. It’s a 50% premium on points and teams have now realized that just by shooting more, even if the total percentage is just the same, the path to winning games by large numbers can become much easier. The analytics show that by taking a large number of threes – more than at any point in history – even if the efficiency goes down, the 50% premium makes it more than worth it. Makes sense, people have been making hard two-pointers for decades. And the coaches tied to these GMs follow suit.
The problem is that many fans have become uninterested with watching their favorite players jack up threes all game long. The product lacks a natural rhythm. This has led to increasing discussion that the NBA should place limitations on how many threes a team should be able to take.
This creates a delima. General managers are measured in wins, but what they know wins has damaged the league’s image. If the league were to impose any restrictions, GMs would have to find new ways to construct winning rosters that go against a constructive decade of analytics. You can try to sway players into taking the regular season more seriously, but you can’t sway teams away from doing things that are proven to win games.
Written by Anders Pryor