Clay Travis: “NBA Finals numbers down massively relative to the last Finals that ended in June, in fact, the average viewership from the last three NBA Finals combined is below the number of people who watched Game 6, 1998, Michael Jordan and the Bulls vs. Karl Malone, John Stockton, and the Utah Jazz. Let me repeat that because it’s such an earth-shattering number… more people watched Game 6 of the NBA Finals than the average number of people who watched the NBA Finals in 2020, 2021, and 2022. Effectively a third of the viewers of that Michael Jordan game against the Utah Jazz exist in the last three years for the NBA. All the NBA people run around saying ‘IT’S NO BIG DEAL! NOTHING TO SEE HERE!’ They don’t want to acknowledge that going ‘woke’ has broken the NBA’s overall audience, and a part of that they say ‘everything is down’… that’s not true. If you go back to 1998 and you look at the number of people who watched the Super Bowl in 1998, do you know what that number was? Ninety million. Do you know how many people watched the 2022 Super Bowl? Ninety-nine million. From 1998 to 2022 the NFL gained around 10% in its viewership, while the NBA lost 66% of its viewers. The NFL has continued to grow but the NBA has become a shell of the audience that it used to have. It lost two-thirds of its viewership, and what’s even wilder to think about is that there are 50 million more people in the United States in 2022 than there were in 1998. The NBA with a bigger audience is drawing a smaller share of the overall sports fan base, and I think it’s because they have gone ‘woke’ and have alienated a huge percentage of people who grew up NBA fans.” (Full Segment Above)
Listen to Clay Travis of Outkick the Coverage explain why he thinks NBA Finals viewership has considerably dropped the last three seasons from the boisterous TV ratings the league was posting in the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s.
Check out the segment above as Travis reiterates his belief that ‘go woke, go broke’ has defined the league since 2020, and that its politics have been a scourge to the NBA ever since.
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