The NBA Finals were a disaster for the league and ESPN/ABC
The NBA has never seen a team assembled quite like the Golden State Warriors.
And that’s evidently not a good thing.
The ratings are in for the 2018 NBA Finals, which saw the Warriors sweep LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers, and they are an unmitigated disaster for all parties involved.
The clinching NBA Finals Game 4 between drew an abysmal 9.3 rating and 16.2 million viewers for the ABC network, per Sports Media Watch. That’s a 13 percent drop in ratings and 15 percent drop in viewership compared to Game 4 last year. The numbers were also a 5 percent drop in ratings and 2 percent drop in viewers compared to the 2016 matchup.
It gets worse. The Warriors’ clinching Game 4 win over the Cavaliers featured the lowest ratings and poorest viewership of any of the 22 NBA Finals games the two teams have combined for in the last four seasons.
Compared to last year’s clinching Game 5 between the Warriors and Cavs, ratings fell a whopping 31 percent and viewership fell an even larger 33 percent.
For ESPN, it’s the worst possible taste that their near $2.7 billion per year investment could possibly leave in consumer’s mouths.
ESPN, whose parent company, Disney, also owns ABC, needs more eyes on its product, and its rights deal with the NBA is obviously a major seller for basketball fans. But it’s difficult to keep eyes glued to an entertainment product whose ending is virtually a foregone conclusion.
Just as importantly, it’s unlikely that ESPN is going to want to stomach another bad investment. Their deal with the NFL nets them “Monday Night Football,” but oftentimes a poor and ratings-averse matchup, and usually the weakest of the NFL Wild Card round playoff games.
Comparatively, ESPN’s deal with the NBA is a far better one, keeping the NBA Finals exclusive to ABC and increasing the amount of live original content they can feature. But all of those benefits are a moot point if people don’t care about the product.
For the NBA, the Warriors’ utter dominance marks a troubling trend. Instead of a wealth of talent spread across the league’s 30 teams, star players are plotting and scheming to concentrate talent among just a few “superteams.”
It not only ruins competitive balance and drama, it also diminishes the teams that try to remain competitive but are still shy of title contention. The Utah Jazz are a fine playoff team that feature some great young talent, but they’re nowhere in the stratosphere of teams like the Warriors. Casual NBA fans will dismiss the Jazz as irrelevant because they can’t compete for a title, despite being a very good team.
As an extension of that, the NBA has created a league that is rife with inequality because the current structure actively harms middle class teams like the Jazz. Teams will either have multiple superstars, like the Warriors and Houston Rockets, or will try to bottom out for a chance to nab an elite draft pick, such as the Los Angeles Lakers and Dallas Mavericks.
There’s no incentive to be a good-but-not-great team. The NBA playoffs should be the salve to that competitive imbalance, but even then, it’s abundantly clear that there are rigid tiers separating the teams.
Even the Warriors and Cavaliers suffer, albeit in a more subjective manner.
To many sports purists, the value of the Warriors’ championships are lesser because the team took the “easy way out.” Again, that’s wholly subjective, but the logic is there. Michael Jordan’s championships wouldn’t have meant nearly as much had, say, Hakeem Olajuwon joined him and Scottie Pippen.
Fatigue for Cavaliers-Warriors has clearly set in. But based on just how otherworldly Golden State’s talent level is, it’s hard to imagine a truly competitive NBA Finals next year as well.
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