Let’s get into the topic du jour…..ratings and the NBA. As has been pointed out widely, recent reports show that NBA television ratings are down 19-25%, which is a larger proportional dip then the general decline in television viewership. This trend has made the usual criticisms of the NBA more acute. While I usually don’t write about the popular to do in NBA circles, I can’t help but wade into the current controversy about whether the NBA game needs some fixes. Let’s do a brief review, FAQ-style…
Is there a problem with the current NBA product?
I’ve been watching the NBA for a while and I think the product is pretty watchable most of the time. Of course, I’m not the NBA’s concern, as I watched the product through since the early 1980s, including the slow-paced, defensive slogs of the 1990s and 2000s.
The real impetus for the audit of the NBA is the ratings decline. The NBA has just locked in a hugely lucrative 11-year, $76 billion deal, so the concerns about bleeding viewers may be real but are not exactly an imminent crisis. The more interesting question is whether the NBA decline is any worse than the declines suffered by most other sports besides the NFL.
Jon Lewis of Sports Media Watch tackled this issue pretty well in a recent article and noted that the NBA decline in ratings isn’t particularly bad and that assessing the data behind it is more complicated: “[e]ven if one takes as fact the broadly-parroted 48 percent decline for NBA games from 2012 — a stat that, again, compares this year’s pre-Christmas average to a season that began on the holiday — it is not out of step with the broader trend. Versus the same 2011-12 benchmark, viewership for Major League Baseball, college football and men’s college basketball is down about 40 percent. Perhaps most importantly, people using television is down 52% to fewer than 50 million, and cable homes are down a third. (The NFL, it should be noted, is down just four percent over that period). None of the above is to suggest that the NBA is thriving as a television property, merely that the persistent claim that the league is tanking in some unique and unprecedented way remains as untrue now as it was in 2020.”
So, it seems that the decline is certainly worth watching but may not be linked to anything that the NBA is specifically doing wrong. Lewis concludes as much: “[t[he NBA is undoubtedly off to a subpar start this season, but that is no surprise for a league whose best-known players are pushing 40, whose top teams are short on charisma, and whose games are still — for a few more months — primarily tethered to cable. One might even argue that the ratings indicate a dissatisfaction with the product indicative of real problems with the quality of the game, though to be frank that is an opinion in search of data to back it up…. Yet anyone who has observed sports media for any length of time knows that ratings ebb and flow with rarely any practical effect. Every single league has slumped for a few years and bounced back, then slumped again. The NBA in particular has surged and slumped every few years for the past four decades, and each trough has been accompanied by concerns about the future of the league — from the ‘Why the NHL is hot and the NBA is not’ Sports Illustrated cover in 1994 to the ‘thugs and punks’ gripes of 2004, to the present day. Paired with the new rights deal, prognostications of disaster over the current ebb seem premature at best and — especially coming from those who promised that the league would soon go ‘broke’ — hard to take seriously.”
This analysis is quite persuasive to me. The ratings decline is not a good thing but there is not too much evidence that the decline was due to a particular thing the NBA is doing wrong, other than starting the season way too early. Indeed, the ratings for the Christmas Day games were quite robust. Having said that, we should examine the prevailing specific complaints about the NBA and see what merit they have.
Too Many 3s?
The most widely discussed complaint has been the proliferation of the three-pointers relative to other shots. Three-point shooting has steadily increased over the years to the current peak of 37.6 attempts per game so far this season. The argument that taking too many threes is a bad thing is facially appealing. Even LeBron James has said this is a bad trend: “ It’s not just the All-Star Game; it’s our game in general. Our game—there’s a lot of fucking threes being shot. So it’s a bigger conversation than just the All-Star Game.”
The counterpoint made by analysts is well-articulated by Yahoo’s Ben Rohrbach: “[w]as it better when teams were shooting 40.1% on 31.3 midrange jump shots per game in 1996-97, as far back as the NBA’s database goes? That figure is down to 9.8 a game (at a slightly higher success rate). All those long 2-pointers have been pushed beyond the arc, where players are making 35.9% of them. By the percentages, the difference in eras is marked by one more missed field goal per game (and more points).”
John Hollinger had a similar position that the three-pointers haven’t really changed anything: “[t]his season’s uptick in 3s is just the latest evolution in replacing all the 20-foot shots with 22-foot shots, and otherwise does little or nothing to change your viewing experience.” To that end, coach antipathy for long twos is nothing new. I recall Pat Riley, back in 1991, telling reporters that 20-footers were the worst shots in basketball and should be avoided at all costs. It just took 25 years for the NBA to live this vision.
This begs the question whether there is something inherently wrong, from a viewing/fan perspective, with taking a lot of threes. Reflexively, it seems like taking too many threes is a bad thing for the fans. All the way back in 2003, George Karl told Marc Stein that three-pointers were hurting the game: “[i]n general, shooting is becoming more and more valuable in our league. I don’t like that because the 3-point line is overvalued. If I was writing a philosophical book, I would say (the 3-point line) has changed the game too drastically, too dramatically.” Stein clarified this further: “[t]ranslation: The lure of the 3-point line, in Karl’s view, has led to an outbreak of what he and others ([Don] Nelson among them) call ‘volume shooting.’ That’s another way of describing what happens in Boston, where Antoine Walker and Paul Pierce sit Nos. 1 and 7, respectively, in 3-point attempts — but also miles away from the top 50 in percentage. Pierce, in particular, is shooting 26.4 percent on treys, with just 43 makes in 163 attempts.”
In 2007, William C. Rhoden declared that the NCAA college three-point line was broken and needed changing. He quotes Larry Keating, chairman of the rules committee, stating that: “[t]he percentage of shooting on the men’s side has gotten too high. The imbalance is too much in favor of the 3-point shot. A higher percentage of total shots are 3-point attempts, and the success percentage is higher.” Rick Pitino supported moving the three-point line back: “[w]e talked about once it got to one in every four shots taken was a 3, we would move it back. Well, certainly we’ve surpassed that.” The NCAA has since moved back the line two times.
I’m not sure how Pitino got to his specific ratio but there does seem to be a tipping point where taking too man threes is a detriment to fans and even teams. Taken to the extreme, a game where the teams only take threes, sounds not very watchable. But the proper ratio for optimal viewership seems harder to assess.
Without much studying to back it up, my intuitive sense is that the average amount of threes taken should not exceed twos (ie should not exceed 50%). In other words, it should be no more likely, on an average possession, that a team shoots a three than a two. But more details are needed. The raw number for the ratio of threes taken does not take into account shot quality. When Steph Curry goes bananas from three, we all love it. When Jordan Poole and Kyle Kuzma take Curry shots, it’s usually less pleasing to the eye. Similarly, nothing infuriates an older fan when a team has a layup on a fastbreak only to kick it out to a teammate for a three-pointer. Someone (namely the NBA) needs to crunch the data on chucker pull up threes versus those taken in the flow to determine if there are too many ugly looks.
The other issue is that the fixes for reducing threes, assuming that is a proper remedy, are limited. A rule capping the amount of threes taken in a game seems quite arbitrary and unsatisfying. Instead, the NBA would have to create a scenario that demonstrates to teams that taking more threes is less offensively efficient.
To that end, a recent paper by professors Shane Sanders and Justin Ehrlich found that the expected value of three-point shots was actually below that of two-pointers since 2017-18. Sanders summed up the findings as follows: “[i]n past conferences, there has been a lot of discussion among NBA executives about how basketball analytics created the 3-point ‘moneyball’ era of basketball and how this has impacted the popularity of the game. Perhaps ironically, our research uses basketball analytics, along with a fully specified team offensive objective function, to say there is now too much 3-point shooting for a point-maximizing offense.”
Sanders’ conclusions do not seem to sway the NBA teams so far, who continue to hoist up threes at higher rates every year. Here is a year-by-year list of league-wide three-point attempts as percentage of total shots (example: .222 means 22.2% of field goal attempts were threes):
| Year | 3-Ratio | 3-point % |
| 2010-11 | 0.222 | 0.358 |
| 2011-12 | 0.226 | 0.349 |
| 2012-13 | 0.244 | 0.359 |
| 2013-14 | 0.259 | 0.360 |
| 2014-15 | 0.268 | 0.350 |
| 2015-16 | 0.285 | 0.354 |
| 2016-17 | 0.316 | 0.358 |
| 2017-18 | 0.337 | 0.362 |
| 2018-19 | 0.359 | 0.355 |
| 2019-20 | 0.384 | 0.358 |
| 2020-21 | 0.391 | 0.367 |
| 2021-22 | 0.400 | 0.354 |
| 2022-23 | 0.387 | 0.361 |
| 2023-24 | 0.395 | 0.366 |
| 2024-25 | 0.424 | 0.360 |
The rate of threes has nearly doubled in the last ten years, with basically no dip efficiency.
Where does this leave us? It seems that teams will continue to skew towards shooting more and more threes until the efficiency dips below that of the standard two-point shot. I personally don’t mind the three-pointer in most instances except when we see ugly ill-advised pull ups. Still, the data shows the shot has gotten too easy. While the Sanders/Ehrlich paper may disagree with the strategy, the threes will continue to increase if the percentage stays relatively steady. I’m agnostic as to the exact optimal ratio but, clearly, the shot hasn’t gotten too easy. The three-point line should be moved back a bit and the corner three (which is a closer shot) should be moved back accordingly, even if it means widening the court. This change isn’t vital to maintain viewership but, with all NBA trends, the teams inevitably take them to extremes until they become a problem (who can forget the nadirs of the old hand checking and illegal defense rules?).
Late Game Strategy
There have been complaints about late game intentional fouls that are designed to prevent teams that are down three points from getting off a game tying shot. I agree that the intentional foul game is not fun but I don’t see a cure that’s definitely better. The one suggestion being bandied about that seems reasonable is that the team being intentionally fouled gets one free throw and the ball to discourage the tactic. I suspect the unintended consequences of such a special rule for late game might be worse than the free throw contests that we see now but I do have an open mind about this issue. In either case, this is not a new issue and it is unlikely that it suddenly has cost the NBA viewers.
Political Activism
Is the NBA too woke? The NBA was much more overtly political in 2020 and that didn’t seem to affect viewership so I don’t know why it would matter more to anyone suddenly now.
All-Star Game/NBA Cup
The All-Star game is unfixable. The salaries are just too high to get the players to engage meaningfully in a meaningless game. The NBA Cup is moderately fun early season tournament but is essentially meaningless to fans. It does work as a structure to get the players care and play hard. The obvious solution to the All-Star game malaise is to turn All-Star Weekend into NBA Cup Week and have the event centered around games where players care about the outcome. The NBA can still bask in the publicity and there still can be vacuous parties and fun, except for the players who are competing.
Fading Superstars
The next arguable problem the NBA has is that its three major American stars, Steph Curry, LeBron James, and Kevin Durant, are aging out and there is no obvious replacement to carry the mantle. Accepting for the sake of argument that NBA fans prefer American stars over the current best players (Jokic, Giannis, Doncic) or future superstars (Wembanyama), the NBA should still be fine.
The same handwringing was present when Michael Jordan was close to retirement in 1998. In May 1998 (right before-MJ’s retirement), Henry Louis Gates wrote about the economic impact of losing Jordan: “In March, Nike announced that its 1998 earnings had declined by seventy per cent, and that it had laid off sixteen hundred employees. Jordan’s imminent retirement is likely to show up on the bottom line, too: this has been clear since he spent that sabbatical, courtesy of Jerry Reinsdorf, playing minor-league baseball.”
At the 1998 All-Star Game, David Stern responded to the concerns about the future of the NBA without MJ: “Can a league like ours say that losing the greatest player of all time perhaps in any sport will not have some negative impact? I’m not going stand here to fool you. Of course it will. But I’m comfortable, as were Time Warner and General Electric, when they agreed to pay us $2.7 billion against the certainty that at least half and probably three-quarters of that contract would be post-Michael, that our business….will continue to grow.”
Stern was right. The NBA followed up the 1997-98 season with the loss of Jordan, an extended lockout, and terrible basketball upon the players’ hasty return. Despite all this, the NBA continued to grow and new stars emerged organically. Fast forward to 2024, LeBron, Curry, and KD are still great stars but they haven’t seriously contended for titles for a few years now and fans still watch. I’ll miss these three when they retire but someone new always emerges.
82-Game Season Too Long?
Is 82 games too long a season? The case for shortening the season has been made repeatedly. The arguments boil down to: (a) fans don’t care about the NBA until after the NFL season is done, (b) too many games increase risk of player injury, and (c) there is a drop in player intensity, at times, from the long season.
These are not exactly new complaints either. Here is John Papanek from back in February 1979, arguing pretty much the same points that are made in 2024: “[t]he teams play a tedious 82-game schedule that begins during the World Series and doesn’t end until early April; then the playoffs begin and go on until June, when most spectators have long since wearied of watching a winter sport.”
And here is Jerry Sloan in 1982, defending the length of the season but also acknowledging some issues with player intensity over a long season: “Sure, the end of the year means more if you’re talking about getting into the playoffs. A win is still a win anytime, but if you’ve got a choice, you want to win those games at the end of the year.”
The NBA has had a few shortened seasons due to labor strife (1998-99, 2011-12) and covid (2020-21, 2021-22) and fan interest didn’t change in any way. A minor reduction to 72-75 games per year and having the season start a few weeks later makes all the sense in the world but….
A reduction in games played is not going to happen because, as this AP Report from 2019 recognized: “the drawback to any shortening of the schedule — and perhaps fewer home games — is a decrease in revenue, which everyone would want to avoid.” The NBA had toyed with the idea of using the NBA Cup to replace the revenues of a shorter season but I don’t see the owners or players voluntarily leaving any money on the table.
Replay
The incessant replays are too much. I find myself changing the channel as the refs pore over the film to determine fouls after the fact, which has been mostly a terrible viewership experience. Can you imagine if we had replay after Jordan hit the game winner in the Finals in 1998? Waiting around to see if MJ may have pushed off in what is a subjective judgment?
Interestingly, this was David Stern’s opinion in 1991: “Look, my view is that our game should not have instant replay. We believe the referees, like the players, are human beings, and anything that takes away from that climate is bad.” Stern did go on to say that “[b]ut there has been a lot written this season about ‘egregious mistakes’ that have cost a few teams some games, so we decided to begin collecting data only—and let me emphasize only—on the narrow issues of the expiration of the shot clock and the three-point line in the last two minutes of the game.”
Replay obviously makes sense in certain contexts but it needs to be more limited in scope and duration. I know the rules attempt to achieve this but it ain’t working and needs a tweak.
Overall
The NBA product is pretty good and any dip in ratings is likely not the result of any NBA-specific problems. NBA revenue has drifted steadily upwards for 40 years. Changes in how entertainment is presented and consumed may change the paradigm but the NBA looks to be in a pretty good financial position for quite a while. As always, however, some tweaks would help the product. Moving back the three would probably make sense but is not a must.