No television ratings are more of a spectator sport than the NBA’s. They’re certainly not the most important television ratings in sports—the whole industry seems to rise and fall on how the NFL is doing—but they are definitely the most gabbed about. If NBA ratings are up, it’s a sign that player empowerment and the star-driven, Instagram-drama world of the league represents the future. If NBA ratings are down, it’s because the league is Too Woke, and the social activism it has been at the forefront of has cost it the theoretical just-a-beer-and-a-game lunch-pail fan. Just know that, heading into the beginning of tonight’s NBA Finals, both sides stand at the ready, tridents in hand, prepped for battle.
Looking at television ratings as a catch-all indicator of a sport's popularity and cultural influence has always been a lazy form of analysis, but in this case, take it with all the sodium you can carry. This Finals already feels unlike any other, for better and for worse. All the star-driven superteams specifically constructed to reach this point—the LeBron and AD Lakers, the Durant/Irving/Harden Nets, the Kawhi/George Clippers—have fallen short, thanks largely to the incessant injuries resulting, for the most part, from the grueling regular season and the short turnaround after the 2020 bubble.
The two huge stars remaining are both unconventional fits: a nomadic and underachieving point guard who is somehow more ubiquitous because of his State Farm commercials than he is because of his brilliant-but-oft-irritating on-court game, and a physical superfreak who plays a dominant but oddly distant style, forever the winner of battles of attrition rather than the player your kids are pretending to be when playing in the park. (Also, Giannis Antetokounmpo is hurt and Chris Paul is always in danger of being so at a moment’s notice.) The competing teams are from freaking Phoenix and Milwaukee. A weird season is getting a weird Finals.
That doesn’t have to be a bad thing, and I’d argue it isn’t. The Bucks and Suns have two long-suffering fanbases who’ve been treated to glorious breakthrough postseasons in 2021; the Suns have never won an NBA title, and the Bucks haven’t won one since Kareem Abdul-Jabbar did it in 1971, when he was still called Lew Alcindor. (He changed his name a month after that title and was in Los Angeles four years later.) These are fun, exciting teams, with fantastic and underappreciated players like Devin Booker, Deandre Ayton, and Khris Middleton. A title will be either the culmination of Paul’s Hall of Fame career or a new launching point for Giannis’s. Someone new, entirely new, is going to win a championship this year. Sure beats just watching the Lakers or Warriors win another one, doesn’t it?
Still, the lack of marquee names and markets seems likely to suppress universal interest: Deep down, people want to watch the Lakers and Warriors, even if it’s to root against them. (The highest-rated game of the NBA season so far was…the Lakers-Warriors play-in game, a month and a half ago.) But the irony is that NBA Finals ratings are almost certainly going to go up from last year’s, which reached historic lows, leaving all sorts of right-wing commentators to crow about the “activist” league “going woke and going broke.” This analysis, shockingly, was self-serving, and incomplete. There were several reasons television ratings were down for sports in 2020—increased streaming options, the weirdness of having no fans in the stands, an all-encompassing presidential election, the fact that the entire world was falling apart—but the primary reason may be the simplest: Sports were on at different times than we were used to watching them. The NBA Finals were in freaking October last year, and people were simply not used to watching the NBA Finals that late.
