Having the games on NBC was a big factor tbh

Now that it’s been a year and the dust has settled….holy cow TNT was horrible at broadcasting games.

The pregame introductions, the actually entertaining prime halftime show, and the sporadic inside the NBA we get sometimes have all been a lovely balance for me.

I also do not enjoy the 720P TNT quality we had for so long. Absolutely ridiculous.

People crave a good Charlotte Hornets squad idk what to tell y’all.

They also doubled the amount of LeBron James’ in the league.

I’m pretty convinced that these streaming networks do not count viewers the same as cable.

Every single sport claims insane viewership increases with games held on streaming. Find it hard to believe. Or at least no one has provided such a good reasoning for why this would be.

Not just a NBA thing.

League parity and easier streaming access both helped. It finally feels like casual fans can actually find games without jumping through three different apps every night.

If NBC had full rights they would put a bunch of games on USA network thinking people will come back and re attach the chord

Leaving TNT certainly made it easier for the casual fan to watch the marquee games. Good move by the league.

With a population of 340 million, it seems impossible to believe that half of them watched an NBA game. Are they double counting?

What? I was told the NBA was hemorrhaging fans.

It’s just a shame that 95% of the games had the same 12 teams on them. With this much streaming coverage, how are there not more games on? They already have local announcing teams and they have TV crews at every game. It would be nice to actually see more than just the Lakers and Knicks every other night

86% can’t be real

Okay can we stop saying ratings are down now whenever a player we don’t like does something

Amazing that not forcing fans to watch games via sub par regional providers, with poor QC standards, helped viewership numbers. /s

Amazon has been a great addition to the nba. (Other than the difficulties last night)

Everyone has Amazon. Their crew and talking points are great.

NBC has also been great.

More incentive for Silver to ignore any real issues with the league

Crazy what happens when you make your games more accessible. More Americans have prime than cable. That mixed with the nbc games blows up viewership. Great job by the league. Now if you fix tanking, slow down pace, etc they’ll be even higher

Games ending like Suns vs Blazers are exactly why ratings are up. Close finishes matter

The Naz Reid effect.

Nah thank god for Prime. Regional networks make it harder to watch and shouldn’t exist

Remember when everyone was saying it was gonna be harder to watch? Lmfao get shit on idiots.

Imagine EVER thinking that moving the games from a cable package you had to pay \(100++ to access, to a few streaming services that cost like \)25 total, was gonna kill the ratings and bury the league.

Feels good to have been right from the start. Not just about that, but about how Inside The NBA wasn’t some pivotal thing that the league couldn’t survive without. A bunch of old bitter dudes who didn’t even watch the games or know 90% of the players names was never carrying the league. Y’all watched a funny YouTube compilation of them and thought they were like that all the time, when in reality they were insufferable haters outside of the funny moments they generated like 3 times a season.

The most in 24 years, that went back to 2002. The 2002 LA Lakers won a 3-peat and was the final season it aired on broadcast which was the NBA on NBC, before it went to ESPN/ABC/TNT. The LeBron/Curry era didn’t get very high NBA ratings for 24 years straight until this season.

Oh look you make the games even slightly more accessible and people watch in ways that can be tallied by the dorks who track the data.

This isn’t news bruh.

i have grown extremely skceptical with any numbers being thrown at us. I am expecting a revision in a few months.

I think the step up in quality broadcasting compared to ESPN is the catalyst

So the Thunder as defending champions draw money and ratings? Well then shit I guess for the good of the league they should run it back. Ignore my flair

Man who would have thought putting the games on platforms people actually have instead of TNT or ESPN deportes would make the views go up?

Not that popular automatically equates to good but reading this makes seeing the “NBA sucks now” narrative from boomers, Xers, and others that wish they were boomers/Xers all the more amusing. I’ve gotten to watch way more NBA this season than any time since before the pandemic.

It’s also nice to have talking heads shows where the former players actually LIKE the current product.

Wemby is a draw brother

I wonder how much of these ratings are inflated, if at all, by the quad box a lot of services have now. I’ll always add an NBA game to my view if there’s one on.

‘They watched games!’

‘For how long?’

‘They watched!’

Having it on NBC played a big part most likely 

I watched 9 straight sixer games earlier in the season and I’m a bulls fan, not sure how this contributes but that says something for me 😂

I use illegal streams almost exclusively except when there’s a game on Amazon, I even throw on games that aren’t even on my team cause it’s so easy to watch. Such a hassle and so expensive to have games on fifteen different platforms, can’t be bothered with that.

On top of NBC/Peacock and Prime being better at broadcasting games than TNT, this season had great narratives and a very intriguing MVP race. We had Wemby having a breakout season, Flagg having a great rookie season, SGA with another historically great season, and Luka, Jokic, Cade, and Brown all having great seasons too.

Fantastic showing as well. Great way to get people interested. Play-In is legitimately one of the best ideas. They need to solidify the in-season tournament as well.

I’ll watch on Prime because I already have an account but I’m not paying for Peacock or ESPN+, so I’m shit out of lox for those games

I don’t get the amazon prime support. I couldn’t find the heat game on my local channel and had to find it on prime. It pissed me off. Even when the thursday night football games are on prime, it’s still available on the playing teams local channel. They should’ve done that. Instead we pirated it. I watched second half at a bar and the feed was literally like 10 minutes behind the radio call, it was pathetic. And that’s not even mentioning sound being off ALL season. So fuck amazon and bezos.

Isn’t basically every sport seeing record numbers this year do to them changing how they calculate it?

Managed to get the parents to drop cable and they’ve been doing just fine with some streaming options, just as I did before them. And it has led them to watching more NBA alongside the family, specifically on Amazon Prime (which they won’t give up yet) and Peacock. I don’t doubt there is plenty of similar going on out there.

Still can’t get ABC local where I live and don’t want to pay for cable to get ESPN. No idea how I’ll be able to watch those games.

Anyone have any ideas?

How do they do more than large scale estimation for these numbers? Can’t measure all the people who have a $10 antenna to hdmi setup for NBC/ABC or the vast number of piraters

wonder if these numbers are low: fanduel has these NBA Teams on FanDuel Sports Network:

• Atlanta Hawks
• Charlotte Hornets
• Cleveland Cavaliers
• Detroit Pistons
• Indiana Pacers
• LA Clippers
• Memphis Grizzlies
• Miami Heat
• Milwaukee Bucks
• Minnesota Timberwolves
• Oklahoma City Thunder
• Orlando Magic
• San Antonio Spurs 

i know i watched like every hornets game this year

They finally figured nobody has TBS

The NBA product is still a pain to try and watch but it’s WAY better than it was last season. Nobody should need an excel spreadsheet to figure out what service their team plays on each game

Remember the beginning of this season when they circulated the calendars showing which channels games would be on and the entire NBA community started clutching their pearls about how the league was being ruined and how it was too confusing when it ultimately boils down to just ESPN vs NBC vs Prime for national games. As if the NFL isn’t split up between 8 different channels and streaming platforms.

Wonder if people will finally stop saying that viewership is down on here lol

Why use that thumbnail though 🤣

More places to stream was a good idea but also the commentary and coverage was a lot better. The TNT guys are funny but YouTube being the only place where I can watch actual tactical breakdowns and smart basketball discourse being held was kinda annoying to me

Another post on increased ratings! I cannot wait until Nielsen adjusts the way they capture audience data in 2 years so we can have an entire new year of “highest ratings for X Event In years!”.

People in this thread commenting like there were actually more viewers rather than just the reporting and capturing of data changing. If viewership actually changed we will never truly know.

I thought the nba was failing though…

I’d argue as well that millions of Americans who enjoy sports have Amazon because its worth having for buying products / shipping etc etc etc etc.

Now if Adam Silver could just fucking get the NBA off ESPN and fully into Amazon, and get rid of Bally Sports we could finally have something great.

NBA product this season was trash, no amount of ratings manipulation can tell me otherwise, but good luck to the rest of you