Posted on 10/06/2020 2:50:50 AM PDT by USA Conservative
Viewership of the NBA Finals set a new record low for television audience for the third straight game on Sunday as more fans tune out because they think the league has become too political.
Overnight ratings show game three viewership was off slightly from Friday's count, Deadline reports:
ABC telecast of Game 3 of the NBA Finals (1.5, 4.08M) from the bubble in Orlando was off a tenth from Friday night’s Game 2 and seven tenths from Game 1 last Wednesday. Last night saw the Heat get on the board with a 115-104 victory to cut the Lakers’ lead in the series to 2-1, with Game 4 set for Tuesday.
Friday’s game two of the NBA Finals set a new low for television audience - breaking the previous low set just two days earlier by game one.
Last Wednesday, game one attracted more than a half-million fewer viewers than the previous low, which was recorded in 2003, The Hollywood Reporter notes:
The NBA Finals posted record-low TV ratings on Wednesday, consistent with steep declines throughout the postseason and with other sports whose seasons were delayed by the coronavirus pandemic.
….
The opening game of the series between the Los Angeles Lakers and Miami Heat brought 7.41 million viewers to ABC, the smallest audience for the finals since at least 1994, when total viewers began to be regularly recorded. The previous low was 8.06 million for Game 3 of the 2003 NBA Finals.
Friday’s game two of the NBA Finals set a new low for television audience - breaking the previous low set just two days earlier by game one.
Last Wednesday, game one attracted more than a half-million fewer viewers than the previous low, which was recorded in 2003, The Hollywood Reporter notes:
The NBA Finals posted record-low TV ratings on Wednesday, consistent with steep declines throughout the postseason and with other sports whose seasons were delayed by the coronavirus pandemic.
….
The opening game of the series between the Los Angeles Lakers and Miami Heat brought 7.41 million viewers to ABC, the smallest audience for the finals since at least 1994, when total viewers began to be regularly recorded. The previous low was 8.06 million for Game 3 of the 2003 NBA Finals.
Truckloads of karma for Adam Silver.
Where to begin? Let’s set aside, for now, the very large issues of China and BLM.
His first big fiasco was blackmailing NC with the All-Star Game - of all the irrelevant things - and complaining about the legislative bill that would outlaw tranny bathrooms.
Silver, definitely not a NC resident, pontificated long and loud about it and presumed to overrule or even take the place of a duly-elected legislature and governor expressing the will of the people.
At the time, Loretta Lynch and one Barack Obama were also strongarming the state, so desirous were they of having Johnny invade Jill’s bathroom at the elementary school. Dems are diseased, depraved sickos.
Silver was like a gambler who’d just won a big hand - he thought the money and the advantage would last forever. His league was riding relatively high in the ratings and believed its own press ie ESPN. ESPN, attempting to wring a profit out of the $1B paid in rights fees, began infusing the NBA into every corner of its coverage, pretending that its players were cultural icons and their barely-literate tweets were Shakespearean.
ESPN went so hardcore NBA that they hired the execrable Jemele Hill and Michael Smith to ‘street up’ the flagship SportsCenter. It was an entirely predictable disaster.
Silver is now lumbered with a league full of Colin Kaepernicks. Militant jocks whose ignorance is on full display and of which they are proud. They are, after all, the ones whose openly-stated goal is to skip college altogether.
The bubble is real and figurative - they will emerge from the quarantine zone to find a very different world - one in which they will be laughingstocks whose earning power is greatly diminished.
Just so. And the players will genuinely fail to understand why their salaries aren’t going up up up.
The NBA brought this on themselves. The same is going to happen to the NFL, MLB and NASCAR.
They polluted sports with their never ending social wokeness.
Now they have lost millions of (once loyal) fans forever and will have a hard time finding new fans. The younger generation cares nothing about sports.
It’s the end of the sports world as we know it and I feel fine. /spit.
Who is playing? Oh, never mind...
The best three-peat ever!
Good. I want to watch all woke sports leagues die.
The American sports scene will eventually redefine itself.
Just keep out doing themselves with each game, lulz
NFL and NBA are total scum.
What is this, “NBA Finals” you speak of?
Unlike the players of the 1960s/1970s....who had four years of real college...these guys are mostly high-school level types, and have zero knowledge over how the team generates money or how their salary relates to real life. This is the sad level of NBA action today...a bunch of ‘kids’ who act and behave as if they were 13-year-olds.
Folks, reclaim your time. Stand up, look in the mirror and confront your pathetic addiction to spectator sports. The first step is admitting you have a problem.
I don’t even think China would like “Plumlee” ball. The game is boring!
Can’t watch LeBron James anyway.
Every since I got smell-a-vision sports have been banned in my household.
Pretty soon pro sports leagues that have become PC soap boxes will exist exclusively for degenerate gambling sites that they have teamed up with.
You’d think these companies would get smarter and put in clauses around ratings. Dip below a certain level and watch the money dip too.
You and I could - and maybe should - write a book on the infantilization of society.
As I don’t have to tell you, we’ve extended childhood to age 30 and beyond. The emotionalism. The overreactions. The tantrums. The sloganeering. The belief in childish simplicity regarding economics (everybody gets what they want when they want it regardless of quantity or cost), health care, sexuality, etc.
There are many causes and culprits starting with indulgent parents but I take the somewhat contrarian view that bans and age limits are some of the worst offenders.
Bans immediately spark the mind to find a way around the ban. Smoking is bad, admittedly, but banning it has led to the vape industry which is wildly popular among young people with all its gadgetry, flavors, brands, etc.
The 21 drinking age has been a disaster all round. Off-campus parties involving students of all ages where oceans of beer and especially hard liquor are consumed in huge quantities as quickly as possible have replaced bars where consumption can at least be monitored if not cut off entirely.
Drinking, like it or not, was once a sign of reaching adulthood. An 18 year old could order a drink next to an 80 year old and be expected to behave accordingly. Socialization was the key to maturity.
There were on-campus pubs - places with cute names, pool tables, video games, etc. Moderation was the rule and - gasp - it was possible to have a (small) beer or two and go back to class none the worse for wear.
3 years between age 18 and 21 is a long time to get blotto at every opportunity. Add in the frequent simultaneous consumption of high-potency cannabis and you have a recipe for disaster.
About 10 years ago there was actually a movement among college presidents, of all people, to lower the drinking age again. They knew about everything I’ve written above and were tired of being the unpaid Alcoholic Beverage Control police. They were aware of the causes and effects among young people and could remember more sane times, even at so-called party schools.
Conditioning remains the strongest shaper of human behavior. Young people have learned to mouth the platitudes of the left - racism, homophobia, etc. Yet one of the most frequent insults heard on an NBA court is ‘faggot.’ They have lectured the players forever about it but it remains evergreen.
As you say, these players are stuck in a pattern of arrested development. Previous militant jocks like Jim Brown and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar would put on respectable suits and hold press conferences to discuss their issues. They had no thought of demanding slogans be printed on fields or uniforms or hijacking TV coverage of games.
Finally, black militants - athletes or otherwise - had better take stock of the heroes they designate. Junkies, thugs, felons, and accessories to same may seem worthy of sympathy if and when they are shot by police but to state the obvious 99.9% of people, including junkies, thugs and felons, can encounter police without facing gunfire. Police require loads of provocation and threat to draw a weapon let alone fire it. George Floyd is not a hero. He really isn’t even a martyr. The tendency is to make icons of the deceased but the haste is revealing: we are now discovering, to no great surprise, that Breonna Taylor may not have been the innocent hard-werkin bystander as portrayed. She may very well have been a ‘babyface’ assisting criminals and had shifted allegiance from one drug dealer to another hence the nerves that caused them to shoot at police.
You silly business person. You make the assumption that they care about profits and their stockholders. Why would anyone in business care about profits and maximizing shareholder wealth?
But a little more seriously, I wouldn't bet on that meeting occurring. Look at cable news as an example. What FoxNews is doing now is irrational ... and going back for sometime. They could easily grow their viewership, but they are bleeding viewers. They don't care about profits nor their shareholders. They much rather spew their woke Marxist drivel.
Did anyone else notice how the media “couches” the game-by-game numbers in this report?
Game 1: 7.41 million. Then,
Game 2: a few less than Game 1, only without any number.
Game 3: a few less than Game 2, only without any number.
This is what pi$$e$ me off the most. I lived up in Seattle while they fought over stadiums for the Seahawks, Mariners and Supersonics. The TAX PAYERS of King County, Seattle, WA VOTED DOWN more taxes to build Safeco Field, now T-Mobile Field, for the Mariners. Voted it down TWICE if memory is correct. BUT, the state legislature voted for it and thus, taxes were raised all over the county to pay for it. They did tax hikes for the Seahawks stadium and they totally remodeled Key Arena where the Sonics played. When the Sonics were sold, the new owners wanted a totally new arena. There were plans all over the place for a new arena, I think one down in Renton and others further down town. THE CITY WAS STILL PAYING FOR THE REMODEL OF KEY ARENA a few years before. Still owed huge, huge millions on that deal. The new owners used that to say, no arena, we're gone to THEIR real home in Oklahoma and that is what they did, move the Sonics to OK City. Most believed that was the plan from the beginning, that they really had no intentions in keeping the team in Seattle. BUT, this is what goes on in the arena wars. HOLD THE CITY AND TAX PAYERS HOSTAGE because owners, who are for the most part, billionaires, needing help to build new stadiums on the tax payers backs. The real thing is, most of those tax payers never go to ball games. I don't know the percentage of the population of a city that goes to games, but I bet the percentage of a city that goes compared to the percentage of the city population is actually very small. Most don't go but get stuck with the taxes to pay for it. Rental car and hotel taxes are paying for Seattle's stadiums if I remember correctly. So, business travelers staying in the city, folks coming as tourists, etc. are paying for stadiums they will probably never go in at all. I saw all this crap when I lived in the Seattle area back in the 1990s and early 2000s when the baseball and football stadiums were built. I believe they have recently got an NHL hockey team. Don't know where they are going to play, I assume they will remodel Key Arena to hold it since it sits empty much of the time. But, REGARDLESS OF WHAT THE TAX PAYERS say, even when they VOTE NO!!!, the politicians will do what THEY WANT TO DO. Seattle is paying through the nose for a lousy baseball team, no playoffs in 20 years or more, a good NFL team who has won a Super Bowl, and NO NBA team!!! The Mariners payed huge money for players who were over the hill or not very good to begin with and flopped. They are now in another rebuild with a general manager who has traded everyone on the team, at least twice or three times it seems sometimes, and yet they still lose. Now they are in a losing youth movement. The GM has moved near 100 players in and out over the past three or four years, yet still loses. How does this guy keep his job???? But, yup, fully understand the stadium hostage holding of the public regardless of what the public says.
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