The NBA has not been the easiest sport to be a fan of in the last few years, quite honestly, and that’s even putting aside the pain of being involved with the Philadelphia 76ers specifically.
From a long regular season schedule and load management to growing costs of subscription services to watch all the games, to the poor marketing of the league by networks themselves — there are a lot of factors contributing to a growing level of apathy amongst basketball fans.
It really doesn’t help that the league’s
own commissioner seems to be completely apathetic to whether people can or will watch the sport he is supposed to be in charge of.
At a recent press conference following the NBA Board of Governors meeting last week, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver raised a lot of eyebrows with his response to being asked about the growing cost of being a basketball fan with games spread out across so many paid subscriptions.
“There’s a huge amount of our content that people can essentially consume for free,” Silver said. “This is very much a highlights-based sport. So, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter — you name it, any service, the New York Times, for that matter, your content is not behind a paid firewall. There’s an enormous amount of content out there — YouTube — another example, that is advertising-based, that consumers can consume.”
When I first read the above quote, I thought for sure it had to be taken out of context or was just blatantly a misquote. Imagine my surprise when I found out that, no, there’s no mistake, that’s really what he said. There’s so many issues to take with these comments, it’s hard to know where to start.
One major issue is that Silver practically dismisses the fact that the NBA is now completely pricing out a not-insignificant number of fans that have been watching the league for years. Game ticket prices have skyrocketed in some markets and now just watching the game from your couch is going to cost you a pretty penny. As gross as this is, though, it is unfortunately happening to some extent in every league, so I’m willing to even put this aside for a moment.
The more insane sentiment of Silver’s comments is declaring in essence that, if you can’t afford to watch the full games or can’t understand why someone would watch full NBA games with such a long season, simply don’t watch! The games aren’t important. Just watch the clips on social media, because NBA basketball is all about the highlights. You’ve been watching games night in and night out despite growing costs, an extensive regular season and growing issues with game quality itself? What a silly idea. The Commissioner says you don’t need to be doing all of that!
It’s absolutely insane to try to call a sport like basketball “a highlights-based sport.” Highlights mean next to nothing without the context of the game they are in. Just look at the “Chris Paul hits a huge 3” meme that has gone around socials for years now — that pokes fun at the stupidity of celebrating a clip without the context of the game around it and it’s precisely the issue with treating basketball like a clip show unless it’s the Harlem Globetrotters. Dunks, long threes and fancy footwork are absolutely fun to watch in a pinch, but they don’t actually mean a damn thing if a team is down 42.
I’m not sure there’s a more concise way to spit in the faces of both the fans that have propped your product up for years and years as well as people that haven’t even fully engaged with the game yet. In one fell swoop, you tell longtime viewers that the games they’ve supported in the past don’t really matter and, in the same sentiment, also tell the next generation of fans to not even bother watching the games (and thus develop and interest in the sport) since they don’t matter — just watch a dunk on YouTube or Tiktok.
(Side note: this is also just a wild stance to take as the Commissioner that insisted the Philadelphia 76ers be investigated for… not playing injured players in regular season games. Does every game matter or not, Silver?)
It begs the question of why Silver would respond this way. Maybe it was just a bad, tone-deaf answer… but the thing is, I don’t think Silver would see it that way. I think he believes in what he is saying, and that’s because he’s doing what he seems to think is his only job: make the NBA richer.
Of course profit is the focus of the league’s commissioner, that part makes sense. The problem is, this profit has not come from a growth in viewership or a development of the game that has drawn in more fans. In fact, it’s quiet the opposite: it actively excuses the interest decline and criticisms the league has been facing.
With a new 11-year, $76 billion TV broadcasting deal, the NBA is sitting on a pile of cash it hasn’t exactly earned. The new deal replaces the previous nine-year one worth $24 billion. Chump change now. However, the NBA has not been immune to widespread television rating declines as viewers continue the battle between having cable, streaming services, or both. As viewership goes down year-over-year, so does the ad revenue for the games… and yet, the NBA is rewarded with a major payday for broadcasting rights — less due to any innovation in the game or developments of viewership and more because the networks were afraid to let the rights go to someone else.
And so, Silver is a hero in charge of a record-shattering TV deal for the NBA. It does not matter that there have been louder and louder complaints around the league concerning the bloated regular season schedule, stars sitting out of games, sports betting everywhere, three-point hunting basketball being less entertaining, foul-baiting, inconsistent officiating and a slew of other issues. None of these things that are crucially impacting fans interest in the sport matter in the end because $76 billion is a lot more than $24 billion. There is no thought of actually innovating the game or considering the future impacts of a continuing decline in both viewership and overall interest in the sport, but who cares? NBA coffers are happy, so Silver is happy.
Eleven years is a long deal. Maybe Silver just assumes it’ll be someone else’s problem by time the next one rolls around. He brought the short-term gains, someone else can deal with the consequences.
