The NBA again lost viewership, with ABC falling 45 percent since the 2011-12 season, while TNT slumped 40 percent, and ESPN was off 20 percent according to Breitbart.
“The past two NBA finals each have fallen one over the other, with last year’s down 51 percent to an all-time low for the championships. The worst was the final game, off nearly 70 percent year-over-year,” Breitbart reports.
According to The Athletic, so far, the average viewership for the league’s games is only 2.83 million.
Breitbart reports that “recent episodes of the NBC crime drama, The Blacklist, average about 3.3 million viewers, while one of ABC’s biggest shows, medical drama, The Good Doctor, averages just over four million per week. Historically, sports out earns any regular TV series.”
Recent polls found basketball fans feel that the league has become far too wrapped up in politics, according to the report.
In September, a Harris poll found that 39 percent of respondents who identified as sports fans felt that the NBA had become too political, and 19 percent said that they had turned off pro basketball because of the NBA’s deep links to China, Breitbart reported.
Reactions to NBA’s displays of leftism and support for the Black Lives Matter agenda may have “alarmed NBA Commissioner Adam Silver because the league boss claimed that this season would dispense with the more overt displays of support for BLM,“ Breitbart writes.
“My sense is there’ll be somewhat a return to normalcy, that those messages will largely be left to be delivered off the floor. And, I understand those people who are saying, ‘I’m on your side, but I want to watch a basketball game,’” Silver said last October.