There's a lot of speculation going on as to why this happened and a lot of people are pointing the finger at the fact that the NBA and its players got too involved in politics last season. Personally, I think it is at least partially because of that.
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There is no denying that a lot of people, particularly in the American viewership, have tired of the politicization of sports. When Black Lives Matter kind of took over the court in the Orlando quarantine bubble, there were a lot of fans that were less than thrilled. There were many people calling for an outright boycott of the organization and apparently a lot of those fans were true to their word as the rating absolutely went down the tubes from year prior. As the playoffs continued, these numbers just got worse and worse and by the end of it all the media was even scrambling to basically beg people to watch it.
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Personally, I thought it was a very bad idea for the NBA to take this route of trying to be a political influencer on such a controversial topic, especially when most of the teams are comprised almost entirely of "black lives" that are some of the highest paid athletes in all of the sporting world. It was too preachy, and the kneeling for the national anthem was bound to piss off 50% of the population, which probably isn't a fantastic marketing strategy. I remember learning in a marketing class when I was in college that it costs 10 times as much to get a new customer than it does to keep one that you already have so the idea that the NBA would make this very risky gamble was very surprising to me.
If you are one of the few people that actually watched the games on Christmas you will notice that all of the BLM stuff is gone and are all of the messages on the jerseys that I guess were meant to be inspirational, but for the most part, I just thought they were dumb.
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If this is in fact the reason why the ratings are in the pooper, then I guess you could say that the ex fans have not yet forgotten because the ratings were not better on Christmas, which is normally a very big sports watching day in USA.
However, I think there are other reasons why the numbers are down so much right now as well. For one thing, the NBA season literally just ended like a month ago - I understand that they had to get it fired back up again to try to get back on track but even for big fans like myself, I am still kind of burned out.
There is also the case of the stadiums, while they are the actual home stadiums of the actual teams, are still completely devoid of fans and therefore the energy that one would normally get from a game just really isn't there. While this is dramatically better than the "bubble" it is still pretty lame for anyone that enjoys the excitement of the roar of the fans and the electricity of a near deafening crowd.
The official number of viewers for the Christmas games is around 3.7 million viewers, which is down from 7 million last year. Obviously this is bad news for the NBA but I don't think we can blame it entirely on Black Lives Matter. I think it would be a lie to suggest that this doesn't have at least something to do with it, but it kind of remains to be seen if people are going to continue this sort of viewing behavior.
The NBA made the right move by getting the politics off the court but I fear that the damage has already been done and that a lot of fans are going to be a bit sore for a while. I'm still going to watch, but it appears as though many people are not as dedicated as I am to the sport and focus on politics a bit more than I do.