Posted on 10/05/2020 3:53:21 PM PDT by SmokingJoe
Instead of a methodical seven game march towards an NBA championship, the 2020 NBA Finals have turned into a methodical march to the historic depths of television watching futility.
Game 1 of the Finals brought with it the lowest viewership since 1994, and Game 2 was the lowest ever on record. But wait! That was before Game 3, which beat out Game 2 by becoming the least watched Finals game in NBA history.
Game 2 earned a paltry 4.5 million viewers, while Game 3 submarined that number by peaking at 4.395 million. Mind you, this is a nearly 70% decline from last years Finals numbers which included a team from Canada. Not only that, unlike this years audience, last years audience was not on lockdown and did not include the games best player, LeBron James.
As Breitbarts Warner Todd Huston reports:
This horrific collapse should not be surprising after polls have found that many fans now believe that basketball is far too political.
A Sept. 2 Harris poll found that 39 percent of respondent who identified as sports fans felt that the league was too political. And another 19 percent said that they had turned off pro basketball because of the NBAs deep links to China.
The 2020 post-COVID season launched with the heavy-handed presence of the anti-American Black Lives Matter agenda.
(Excerpt) Read more at breitbart.com ...
Sports is pretty much dead. I used to be a sports junkie since a kid and now I give zero cares for any of it.
Every game and every insult to our flag and country drives more fans away.
The NBA may be the most fragile of the BLMs thus on their teams, insulting good Americans everyday.
Basketball.....isn’t that the popular game played in all the burned to the ground cities across our country? Yes, the same places where the knockout game, murder cops, burn innocent peoples cars, order whites around and you know, stuff like that?
Frankly, I hope they all go broke. Perhaps they can find jobs at miniature golf courses.....I wouldn’t bother hiring any of them to work in the cotton fields. Oops, that might have sounded racist....it’s ok, I am used to it and I no longer care.
Self-inflicted ... couldn’t happen to a more ‘deserving’ bunch.
It kinda goes to show that sporting events need the entire ‘community’ - this might be good for networks negotiating the price to air the games on TV. Bad of course for the sports leagues.
But if you can’t hang out in sports bars, and can’t go into sports books, and otherwise can’t talk to your friends who went to one of the games etc, then all the luster is tarnished. Watching sports on TV without all the community involvement you might as well watch 90-day fiancee on TV.
The injection of politics into sports probably knocks 25%-30% off the top, too.
As an aside, as a binge TV watcher (I try to cram/binge as much TV as I can, when I can, and not wait days or weeks for another episode) the episodic nature of sports TV has no appeal to me. I’d rather watch a re-run of the 1988 Dodger’s world series since I can see it all when I want. Maybe they should play 7 games all in the same day!?!
People who watch them are their enablers.
People who watch them are their enablers.
I went to a Lakers game a couple of years ago. Totally sucked. LeBron scored more points in his first shot in the 2nd half than he did the entire first half. But, I got to share an ice cream sandwich with my sick dad. Well worth every penny.
L8r
Watch the entitled behemoths show up on TV and threaten to burn down your city for depatronizing them. RACISTS!!!
Unbelievable that people are watching at all.
“How low can they go?”
Doesn’t matter, ESPN will inform the Trailer Trash American descenters that the NBA ratings are up in Spain and Italy like they did about a month back. Is that Shark Tank Clock Clucker of a Dallas Mavericks Owner making excuses again/yet?
.....to borrow the old “feed the parking meter” adage.......these billionaires that own these clubs, which they wisely keep in a separate company in all things from themselves personally, will not “feed the parking meter” for very long with a 70% reduction in revenue. Like good businessmen everywhere, they will put this separate company in bankruptcy and never look back. The bankruptcy will void all player contracts.
Wonder how the ratings in China are.
I only come to sports threads to gloat. Being a clumsy oaf all my life made me unsuitable for sports so I became a nerd. Thinking became my excercise. I warm up by contemplating. I also do repetitions of theorizing and speculating to keep my massive cerebrum in top form. I also pretty much despise the jock types and laugh behind their backs and generally ridicule them even though they get more chicks.
But all the kneeling and fist raising just shows how little time they spend on reason and logic. They dont know what they are being paid for nor do they know who is actually paying them. I dont go to games and even if I thought the games were good I would not watch because they are being jocks again. They have to learn a lesson. See how much they get paid when their team is losing money. Give it a year or two longer. They will learn and hopefully it will be too late.
I suspect they will be begging for bail outs, and then have the games piped into schools like CNN to keep ratings up
Actually, a lot of my family/friends as a group are enjoying watching these pros in death spirals or seriously wounded spirals re attendance.
What could possibly be the motive for these crappy ratings??
And I’m deeply concerned that the only “people” watching these games are empty chairs in sports bars and ferns in restaurants, along with waiting lounges in empty airports... The REAL number of viewers is probably far less than what they are claiming.
The last time I watched any of the NBA was the all star game a few years back while at a Restaurant. For some reason, the players were simply running back and forth on each other dunking the ball. The score was headed to 200 pts for each team! My sis’ bf tells me it’s because the players refuse to play defense in an exhibition game, don’t wanna get hurt.... I was appalled, but today, it makes sense......worthless league, players, .... and I used to be a HUGE nba fan as a kid.
I come for the schadenfreude. I have noticed that there aren't many still admitting to watching these huge wastes of time and energy. There are still a few though, I also come to laugh at them.
WaHun James is the least liked person in sports.
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