If the NBA was looking to score a big ratings windfall to kick off a new season, this wasn't it.
Viewership for most live sporting events has tailed off in the cord-cutting era. Traditional ratings metrics are still instrumental as a determining factor in advertising revenues, even though they fail to capture an audience that increasingly relies on streaming platforms to watch games.
Nonetheless, any significant dip in ratings has the attention of the league offices in Manhattan. NBA Commissioner Adam Silver has an interesting theory as to why this year's television ratings are down.
"I think we're just looking at a couple weeks of ratings," Silver told Front Office Sports. "There's always some unique things. This year we were up against the World Series, Dodgers-Yankees, two very attractive teams, they brought in a big audience. You had a presidential election which was commanding an enormous amount of attention. So I don't think it has anything whatsoever to do with the style of play on the floor."
Ratings for the World Series on Fox were the best MLB has seen since 2017. The Los Angeles Dodgers' five-game series victory over the New York Yankees was just the tip of a month-long iceberg. Fox said its coverage of the 2024 baseball postseason averaged 7,485,000 viewers in all -- a 42 percent increase compared to last year's average (5,265,000).
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Any presidential election is an inherently seminal event, guaranteed to deliver ratings for news-focused networks like CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC in early November, as well as the traditional "Big 3" networks -- CBS, NBC, and ABC. Donald Trump's victory over Kamala Harris was an event that effectively unfolded over two days (Nov. 5-6) but had viewers tuned in for daily updates much earlier. The new NBA season tipped off Oct. 22.
Silver told FOS he is bullish about the league's social media reach, and its potential streaming audience in the wake of a new contract with Amazon Prime set to take effect next year. But is the commissioner correct in laying blame for the NBA's poor ratings on events far beyond the league's control?
Time will tell. The second and third weeks of November offered the league a fresh start in the eyes of viewers who were perhaps too consumed with everything else in the world to give a new NBA season a chance.