That’s pretty amazing for the WNBA finals to be up that much while simultaneously going against more competition than it normally faces.
I mentioned this in an earlier post but the league and its players leaning heavily into the cultural left is actually probably good for business overall. The type of casual fan that wouldn’t watch because of that for the most part isn’t watching the WNBA anyways and never would and it probably establishes a stronger connection with most of their core fanbase or people who could potentially be part of their fanbase.
The only group that might not culturally identify with that who watches would be some Dad’s who watch with their daughters. But the kind of dad who would watch the WNBA with/because of his daughter probably isn’t going to stop over that either.
Also, women’s sports have been gaining traction in recent years, which is great.
Went to outkick to find the article discussing how MLB just had the lowest tv ratings ever. All I found was more ad infested right wing articles that are anti NBA. The World Series had some very competitive and close games, the big story line with the Dodgers, and almost no sports competition for most games. Were there BLM protests that I missed?
Of course Outkick has a narrative and isn’t going to run stories that go against it. Outkick is pretty right-leaning (i.e. fox, etc.), Deadspin is very left leaning (i.e. Daily Beast), and ESPN is left of center (i.e. CNN).
That said, on the story, I still think those MLB ratings make the NBA finals look bad. Tampa has some exciting young players but literally is dead last in terms of brand marketability in the MLB. The Dodgers was a nice pull though for tv viewership. Yankees-Braves would have probably been more comparable to the LAL-Miami matchup and even still, the NBA had their supposedly second most marketable/well known star of all time on its premiere franchise.
And with that the WS overall was down 36% vs. the NBA finals’ 51% despite MLB supposedly being a dying game and the NBA supposedly being a sport folks were talking about challenging the NFL a few years ago. I would also argue that Toronto vs. the Warriors w/o KD was a worse matchup than Astros-Nationals.
And look at game 6 of the two series. For hoops it was down to 7.5mm from 18.7mm the year before. For the WS it was down to 13.2mm (which is the overnight number and will probably go up with Nielsen numbers) from 16.43mm the year before.
So the racial equality push cost the NBA only a slight amount? Like I said earlier? Blowout game 6 for the NBA going against the NFL, exciting MLB game 6 by itself. I turned the game off for the middle part of the game as somebody who is involved in basketball every day. When you factor in international numbers (insert China joke) were up for the NBA playoffs, they are less worried than MLB about the future.
Why was the Stanley Cup down so much? Horse racing? Did the NBA playoffs get hurt going up against MLB playoffs?
There are tons of questions to ask. It’s clear politics isn’t the only issue here. It doesn’t even seem to the biggest.
Everything is down big except NASCAR, some golf, and WNBA finals. And, NASCAR has plenty of current controversies in the politics space yet haven’t been impacted. You would also expect the NFL to get hit harder if politics was driving this.
This is a weird throw away year for lots of reasons discussed. Lots of things causing the decline.
Bumping this. So overall I think first week and Christmas NBA ratings were decent (not terrible, not great) for the COVID sports viewership world.
However, this AP headline and story reporting on the ratings is pretty much NBA approved propaganda given how much the headline and even the story obfuscates the difference between opening during Christmas and opening during October.
If Deadspin or some other left leaning site ran this to combat Clay Travis and other right wing folks talking about the ratings tanking, that seems like fair game. But running this as AP reporting seems pretty bad.