The NBA held their annual All Star weekend of festivities which culminated in the All Star Game last Sunday night at Madison Square Garden in New York City. The Western Conference All Stars won a very high scoring game last Sunday night in the marquee event of the weekend.
The problem with the NBA All Star Weekend is that the general consensus was that most people did not care. The NBA All Star Game is known throughout sports circles to be a mostly unwatchable event because the teams play zero defense. That trend certainly continued in this year’s installment. Russell Westbrook of the Oklahoma City Thunder finished as the MVP of the game with 41 points which is one point shy of the record for total points scored in the event.
The Skills Competition took place over in Brooklyn in a first for the All Star Game, having events in multiple arenas. The entire weekend of NBA events was not even on the radar screen for many people in the New York City and New Jersey metropolitan area. I think that several reasons exist for that sentiment around this game and this past weekend:
- The performance of the two local teams – both the New York Knicks and the Brooklyn Nets are playing poorly this year and coming into the season both were expected to at least compete for playoff spots. The Knicks have the worst record in the entire NBA at the All Star break, which is one of the biggest surprise storylines of the season. New Yorkers characteristically like winning teams so this cannot be underestimated as a role in diminishing local interest in the event
- The weather – it was very cold over the weekend in the New York area with temperatures dropping into the single digits or below zero with the wind chill values. That goes a long way toward lowering the interest level in the events surrounding the All Star Weekend in the NBA. When it is that cold, the average casual sports fan is not going to head out or take their children out in that type of brutally cold weather
- The Big Apple – the large scale sporting events which normally would dominate all the attention in other cities end up getting swallowed up by New York City. A good case in point was the Super Bowl being held in the New York area in February 2014. The biggest showcase in sports was a small blip on the radar screen in New York, it was almost like a side bar to everything else going in the City at that point in time. The Big Apple has so many people with so many different interests that it just eats up these larger events, and I think the NBA All Star Weekend fell into that dynamic
No Comparison
The most revealing way to demonstrate the impact of these factors on the NBA All Star Weekend is to compare the reaction of New York City and the surrounding metro area to the Major League Baseball All Star Weekend. When it was held at Yankee Stadium and then more recently at the Mets home, Citi Field, the MLB events drew huge crowds and had an interest level untouched by the NBA event and even the Super Bowl.
That interest level is driven by a few factors: the local baseball teams both have extensive fan bases respectively, the weather was warm because it was the middle of the summer, and New York is known to be a baseball town. I also think some of the interest in the game when the Yankees had it was because it was connected to the final year of the old Yankee Stadium, one of the most historic sports venues in the world.
The MLB All Star Game is similar to the NBA event of the same kind in that it does not carry the same interest level from the perspective of some fans. The MLB All Star event is seen as a simulation of a real baseball game, where the pitchers usually pitch no more than an inning or two at the most. The powers that be within the league office at MLB attempted several years ago to “up the stakes” on the All Star Game by having the winning league from the game gain home field advantage for the World Series competed at the end of that given season.
However, that change did little to increase interest in the MLB All Star Game, in fact the TV ratings have gone down in the past 4 years when compared to earlier in the 2000s when the game would average around 10 million total viewers compared to 6.7 to 6.9 million total viewers over the last four years.
Lost In The Shuffle
The NBA All Star Game this season in New York scored a 4.3 rating and 7.2 million total viewers airing on both TNT and TBS networks. This rating could be viewed as disappointing considering the event was held in the world’s most famous basketball arena, Madison Square Garden, and was held in the media capital of the world.
By comparison, the NBA All Star Game’s ratings for last season were 4.3 and 7.5 million total viewers, and in 2013 the rating was a 4.6 and total viewers topped out at 8 million. These figures are comparable to the baseball event and in my view they reflect a growing disinterest based upon a similar common thread to the root of the disinterest in the baseball event of the same type: it is a simulated game, an exhibition. The fans of the NBA, by and large do not want to see a game played with no defense at all and at times questionable effort by the players. I have seen so many times in the NBA event the attempts for trick plays and fancy dunks get missed or poorly timed, it ends up being a spectacle of sloppy play and endless turnovers. That is not fun to watch.
I have read in some other mainstream sports sites, the suggestion that the NBA should consider moving the start time of the game up by an hour, so in this way it would not have competition from prime time programming on the East Coast and in the Central time zone either. Those in the audience might remember that NBC would utilize the earlier start time when they held the NBA television broadcasting contract, the game would air at 5 PM Eastern time especially in the year that the Winter Olympics were televised on NBC.
I remember those earlier telecasts as a kid, and I actually think that they work better for a younger audience which would be tuning in to see their favorite NBA stars compete in this showcase event. It may also increase social media traffic for the event too because a larger “tween” and teen audience from a demographic standpoint would reflect an increase in social media activity.
Furthermore, in what should give the NBA further evidence that a change of some kind needs to be made to increase interest in the event, the NBA All Star Game was not even the highest rated program within that time slot. The AMC scripted drama series, “The Walking Dead”, outperformed the game in the ratings which is almost unheard of today with live sports programming of almost any type characteristically always winning the time slot.
The only event of the All Star type which performs worse in the ratings is the NHL hockey event which this season was held in Columbus, Ohio. The NHL game drew only 1.1 million total viewers in the U.S. and the ratings in Canada were down about 40% from the prior year. The game has already changed the start time to begin earlier to reduce competition from other programming.
The rationale behind this decline, in my view, is probably similar to the other events of its type, it is unwatchable because the game is not competitive. The NHL game has been maligned for years for the fact that nobody gets hit in the game and nobody plays defense. A hockey game stripped of intensity is not an event which will tend to draw the average viewer or the casual fan. The case in point is that this year’s edition of the NHL All Star Game featured a record 29 goals scored between the two teams. That is not the type of game that fans will tune in to see.
In addition, the other reason why the NHL game viewership could have declined stems from feedback I observed on social media regarding the drafting of the teams to play on a team captained by a player rather than a selection based on the best players in each conference. The feedback I read was that many fans want to return to the East vs. West format of the game rather than teams that are a mix of talent from across the entire league.
The fact remains that regardless of the sport, really with the exception of NFL football, the ratings for certain sports programming remains variable. Baseball is a regional sport, so it is never going to gain the same national viewership as other sports. The ratings for NHL hockey have seen an upward trend in recent years but that is also relative to the size of the fan base for the sport. The regular season games are still heavily market dependent for television ratings and the most popular way to see hockey remains the in-person live game experience.
The viewers have more choices than ever before with the advent of streaming television services, video on demand services, and movie rental options from services such as Red Box. If these games celebrating a collection of the best players in that particular sport are going to rebound in the ratings they have to embrace some changes.
Back To Broadway
I have lived in the New York – New Jersey metropolitan area my whole life, and I have listened to people I know and fans on sports radio shows here complain in the past that New York rarely gets the chance to host the larger sporting events. The argument being that the leagues would never have the ratings, the interest, and the revenues that they have currently without the large contribution from the New York area based on the sheer size of the population of the market alone.
However, the fact is that with the exception of the baseball All Star Games held here in recent years many of these larger sporting events have not captured the broad based interest in New York like it has when the same events are held in other cities. I am not sure why that is exactly, it could be weather dependent, it could be the expensive nature of the event in a down economic market for this area, or it could just be that the people here have access to so many other options that it is difficult to capture their collective focus on one event.
In the end, these events and their ability to be held in New York especially during the winter, need to be reevaluated. The leagues need to determine how they can recapture the attention that these events once held in the national consciousness within the rapidly changing dynamics of the media, entertainment, and social media.
(Television ratings data and some background information courtesy of Yahoo! Sports, The Sporting News, The Baseball Almanac, Sports Media Watch, and CBS Sports)