Especially when the moves WERE working out before everyone’s injuries derailed them. Like I said earlier, that half a season was the most excitement that Chicago fans had since Butler/Rose came up almost a decade earlier.
In-season NBA news thread
- Thread starter nattysez
- Start date
The main point is that the Vucevic trade wasn't done in a vacuum. It was done as part of a larger plan which incentivized the Bulls to pay up in the trade.
The trade looks terrible for Chicago, no doubt. However that's in large part because the plan didn't work. As you note, they did achieve relevancy for a time so you can see what they were thinking.
I agree it got them relevance. I think there's a general point here though, that's not post hoc criticism:
Giving up multiple picks and players for non-stars has an inordinately high chance of going wrong.
Vucevic is good, but even at his best, he doesn't guarantee you anything.
Gobert is a great defender, but he's limited offensively, and more like a top-25 guy and also starting to age.
Mitchell is close: I think he's good enough offensively, and had enough room to improve defensively, that the deal probably made sense given his age.
People were worried that Brad had broken this rule in trading for DWhite, which was reasonable. Two 1sts and a decent young player would have been too high imo, but I think they walked the line well by not really giving up players and also protecting the swap top-1. Combined with the extremely high probability that Tatum is a 30 year-old on a supermax in 2028, and Brad walked the line well here.
I think implict to this conversation is that people have different definitions of what was good for a team in Chicago's position to do. I think we are as Celtics fans conditioned to think the only good idea is to compete for a title, but Chicago wanted to be competitive -- I think that's rational and perfectly understandable.
I also think trading for Vuc was not the best way to go about that, and I think it was possible to see that without hindsight, even if I didn't personally, because my pride isn't entering into this discussion. And posters who did see it should get credit for that! It doesn't make anyone stupid per se that they didn't, but Vuc was already getting worse by the time he was traded. Surround Derozan with good defenders and shooters wasn't such a bad idea, but they should've targeted a player with more defensive upside, I think, or not made a trade at all.
As of right now, DARKO thinks Wendell Carter Jr. is better than Vuc, and I think given that he was only like 21 when he was traded, and that there were other good assets in there, yeah, it was possible to have seen it was a bad deal at the time, or at least that it was a deal that had a lot of potential to be very bad for Chicago. Nevermind that Wagner and Carter Jr would be a great for Chicago right now, they might just be better players than what they were traded for currently.
I also think trading for Vuc was not the best way to go about that, and I think it was possible to see that without hindsight, even if I didn't personally, because my pride isn't entering into this discussion. And posters who did see it should get credit for that! It doesn't make anyone stupid per se that they didn't, but Vuc was already getting worse by the time he was traded. Surround Derozan with good defenders and shooters wasn't such a bad idea, but they should've targeted a player with more defensive upside, I think, or not made a trade at all.
As of right now, DARKO thinks Wendell Carter Jr. is better than Vuc, and I think given that he was only like 21 when he was traded, and that there were other good assets in there, yeah, it was possible to have seen it was a bad deal at the time, or at least that it was a deal that had a lot of potential to be very bad for Chicago. Nevermind that Wagner and Carter Jr would be a great for Chicago right now, they might just be better players than what they were traded for currently.
Attachments
What took Chicago out of relevance was losing Lonzo Ball. Nobody is criticizing that deal because they used flotsam in that S&T and got him on a very reasonable contract. I loved that deal at the time and still do (even though the outcome hasn't been ideal). If we were so "results-oriented" we'd be dragging that deal, but nobody has, so the accusation of ex-anti doesn't float.
DeMar (one 1st, the entire NBA passed on him) and Caruso (free - the Lakers opted for THT) were also excellent, opportunistic deals in the Summer of 2021.
The reason the Bulls had their season of relevance was because of the Summer of 2021.
It's really hard to recover from the Ball injury because they tossed in 3 young assets and basically gave Markkanen (for Nance) his walking papers after acquiring a shooting BIG that is unable to play perimeter defense
To @lovegtm 's point.
1. You need to be damn sure before giving away multiple 1sts (lottery picks
) + a young highly drafted player2. Adding older scorers, on bad teams, can be fool's gold.
3. Never go for an aging, expensive, bad defensive Center. The 5 is where bargains can be found.
4. Compounded by the fact that the Bulls had several young, highly-drafted improving 4/5s (WCJ, Markkanen, Gafford, Patrick Williams)
[/QUOTE]
This kind of nails it. Worse yet the 2021 trade deadline was a complete buyers' market (Orlando gave away a 20pt scorer for two 2nds).
The Vucevic deal was forced. It didn't look like anything like their Summer 2021 deals.
Trying to lump Nikola in with those deals is nothing more than thread gymnastics
Understand why CHI thought Vuc was an upgrade but it's tough to say they didn't overpay in that market. (Here's the list of deadline deals: https://www.hoopsrumors.com/2021/03/2021-nba-trade-deadline-recap.html.) In addition to Fournier being dealt for 2 2nds, Gordon was dealt for a 2025 1st round pick (protected 1-4), which is unlikely to be any good at this point.
If anyone is interested, here's a recent article kind of defending the trade: https://theanalyst.com/na/2023/02/chicago-bulls-trade-for-nikola-vucevic-is-not-nearly-as-bad-as-you-think/
Thanks for that article. That's the sort of analysis I prefer - its unflinching that Wagner's emergence makes the trade pretty rough from the Bulls perspective.
I really like this quote too because it gets to the heart of how we might evaluate players going forward. Vucevic, like every single one of his peers, is a talented but flawed player.
The stupid Bulls made a bad trade LOLz and their overall plan seems to be failing. But there is some logic at work if you are willing to look for it.
I really like this quote too because it gets to the heart of how we might evaluate players going forward. Vucevic, like every single one of his peers, is a talented but flawed player.
IMO we need to get away from the talk radio binary value judgements like calling a player bad because they don't do some things well. Player talent is a spectrum and the league operates as such. I think we should be following suit.
The stupid Bulls made a bad trade LOLz and their overall plan seems to be failing. But there is some logic at work if you are willing to look for it.
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Most commentators looked at this trade at the time and thought, "That's a lot for Vucevic." Similar to how most commentators during the time of the Rudy Gobert trade said, "That's a lot for Rudy Gobert." Yes, sometimes hindsight affects the way we view things, but in cases like these, the prevailing opinion was a certain way the time and it's been borne out to be correct since.
I don't know what additional information we'd need to know to make that assertion. We have history, statistics, our own eyes, the eyes of scouts, and other information at our disposal. It doesn't take a genius to look at Vuc and see his limitations as a winning basketball player and wonder how he's worth two lightly protected picks and a former lottery pick just 2.5 seasons into his career. People have opinions about all sorts of things - sports, politics, policing, medicine, academia, entertainment - despite being at an information deficit. It's not always the case that those closest to something like this are any wiser than the commentators expressing an opinion on it. Why? Because we know that Jerry Reinsdorf is not always rational, and we know that Alex Rodriguez's ownership group is not always rational, and that irrationality can lead to overpaying for mediocrity because it gives less leverage to GMs.
We fundamentally disagree on your need to appeal to authority. Just because someone is the GM of an NBA franchise does not necessarily mean that they're any good at their job, same as every other profession on earth, and just because someone is good at their job doesn't necessarily mean that they don't occasionally make bad decisions, same as every other profession on earth. I don't need to have played basketball or have worked in a front office for a decade to think that David Kahn was a bad GM, or that it was dumb for Philadelphia to trade Bridges for Zaire Smith and first rounder.
We can agree to disagree that fans or pundits real time grades are in any way meaningful. The information asymmetry alone (about overall plans, team fit, chemistry, upcoming contract negotiations etc) makes it silly.
For example what if a team executes a poor trade because its better than getting nothing or struggling with a bad roster fit? Or what if a team doesn't have any sort of near term path to either the lottery or relevancy? That context matters yet rarely is considered by fans and never by talk radio types.
Also, people will always post that they know better than the people they are critiquing. Forgive me if the burden is on those folks to demonstrate that they actually know better and it isn't their biases showing. We can grade this trade now and it looks bad for Chicago. You may have known that to your core at the time but I have yet to meet any human being who knows exactly what is going to happen.
We had a brief tangent into Quin Snyder last week and his "always makes the playoffs, rarely advances" record. The term "conference semifinals" used by ESPN.com stuck out to me as an accurate, but odd, choice of words.
Washburn in today's Glob took a different approach:
Washburn in today's Glob took a different approach:
Snyder seems to be a perfectly fine coach. Just interesting to me how its written about.
I thought Snyder was quite good in Utah, and consistently got teams to overperform. To me, the biggest black mark on his resume is how much Mitchell was allowed to coast on D. I know there were extenuating circumstances (offensive load mostly), but you'd like your coach to at least get that defensive effort/execution a notch higher in the playoffs, if not the regular season.
Ice Tray approves.
I liked the Dejounte Murray acquisition, although Radio Hogan didn't like the cost. Brad paid a lot less for White, and the talent gap between Murray/White isn't that great. Rumors are that the owners' son was behind that move, the GM resigning, and the McMillan firing. If that's the case the Hawks could be in for a Knicks/Dolan-style run
Not NBA bit still great
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">The craziest 20.9 seconds in Maine HS basketball history.<br><br>Four lead changes. Two dramatic and 1 layups. And a shot that people will be talking about for a long time.<br><br>This is how we had it. <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/MaineMadness?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc^tfw">#MaineMadness</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/MEBBallRankings?ref_src=twsrc^tfw">@MEBBallRankings</a> <a href="https://t.co/Acp5u0sDn0">pic.twitter.com/Acp5u0sDn0</a></p>— James Corrigan (@RealCorrigan) <a href="View: https://twitter.com/RealCorrigan/status/1629356894497263616?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
">February 25, 2023</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">The craziest 20.9 seconds in Maine HS basketball history.<br><br>Four lead changes. Two dramatic and 1 layups. And a shot that people will be talking about for a long time.<br><br>This is how we had it. <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/MaineMadness?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc^tfw">#MaineMadness</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/MEBBallRankings?ref_src=twsrc^tfw">@MEBBallRankings</a> <a href="https://t.co/Acp5u0sDn0">pic.twitter.com/Acp5u0sDn0</a></p>— James Corrigan (@RealCorrigan) <a href="View: https://twitter.com/RealCorrigan/status/1629356894497263616?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
">February 25, 2023</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
I bet there are some Scots parents who are thinking about how to raise money so that they can have replay in Maine HS hoops.
I think it was 1.3 left.
The clock on the TV feed was absolutely screwed up; in fact, it went to 0.0 after Thornton hit the 1st "and 1" and the Bonny Eagles were racing up the court.
https://theathletic.com/4258227/2023/02/28/retired-nba-player-poll/
The Athletic surveyed 101 former players on a variety of questions, most notably who is the best current NBA player. The surprises were Lebron at #1 (28.1%) and Kyrie at 7 (2.2%), the rest was fairly standard (in order, Jokic, Giannis, Durant, Curry, Doncic). Most notable was the complete absence of Embiid. I figured at least a couple of former players (most of whom played in eras in which a dominant center was the most valuable player to have) would have voted for him.
The Athletic surveyed 101 former players on a variety of questions, most notably who is the best current NBA player. The surprises were Lebron at #1 (28.1%) and Kyrie at 7 (2.2%), the rest was fairly standard (in order, Jokic, Giannis, Durant, Curry, Doncic). Most notable was the complete absence of Embiid. I figured at least a couple of former players (most of whom played in eras in which a dominant center was the most valuable player to have) would have voted for him.
I'd say that anyone who picked him misunderstood the question, but it seems like he'd be a reasonable answer for #4 (which current player do you most enjoy watching), but he only got 2.4% of the vote for that one. As has been said, Kyrie is your favorite player's favorite player.
Decent Stratechery article on the NBA, for those who like such things. His concrete recommendations seem a bit shallow, but it's sometimes good to take a step back at where the money comes from, rather than assuming it will always be there:
https://stratechery.com/2023/what-the-nba-can-learn-from-formula-1/
https://stratechery.com/2023/what-the-nba-can-learn-from-formula-1/
I enjoyed that article, especially re: the attitude that the sport has to new fans. There is, for lack of a better term, a hipster bike shop mentality that seems to be infesting the NBA and its fandom and that is not really the way you want to go.
Right, and it's interesting how re-examining the fan relationship from first principles can have huge marketing benefits.
I imagine it will probably take a financial crisis for the NBA to do that type of re-examination......but such crises have happened many times in the history of professional sports.
I enjoyed the article as well but I'm sure anyone involved in the NBA read the article and said, "How do you not mention social media?"
From what I understand, NBA has taken the position that younger viewers don't watch actual games and consume the product in a much different way. For example, the NBA generated 1.1 billion social media views in the last week of December/1st week of January, which was a record: https://www.basketballnews.com/stories/nba-set-socialmedia
The problem is that this:
- Doesn't translate into significant money for the league
- Doesn't result in higher television viewership for the league (it probably contributes to the record low viewership we're seeing recently)
That's leaving aside the validity of a social media "view" and the scant evidence that the people generating these social media views are young people. So to your point, I think the thing to criticize is the NBA's social media strategy itself. It hasn't improved the fans relationship with the players or the game and it's mostly catered to a group of rabid fans like us instead of building on the fanbase.
What record low viewership are you referring? What am I misinterpreting about the national viewership numbers that I’m seeing which are up from last year and a new mega tv deal coming up?
NBA all star game: https://www.sportsmediawatch.com/2023/02/nba-all-star-ratings-viewership-record-low-tnt/. This is supposedly a marquee event for the league.
RSNs are going bankrupt (Bally) or leaving the market entirely (Warner)
National TV viewership is up 1% over last season, but still significantly down compared to pre-pandemic
Up 1% would seem to be enormous with television viewership down so much across the board no? Why are they talking about a $75B national contract up from the current $25B if things are so dire? Revenues are still skyrocketing without the new deal too.
I don't think he implied it was dire. It's more a structural media issue than an NBA problem.
We shouldn't be shocked if Silver tries to ink/announce a partial deal earlier and set a price/level. David Stern was a master of this, getting the TV deal done before the FBI announced the Donaghy indictment.
I wouldn't read much into All-Star game ratings, a meaningless exhibition. The NFL has never been healthier and I believe they have gone to a flag football format.
To your first point, no. I wouldn't say that gaining 1% viewership is that much when they've lost 15-20% viewership since 19/20. It's better than losing more viewers, but they have a lot of work left to get to where they were pre-pandemic.
You're conflating two things - the size of a fanbase and the value of that fanbase to advertisers. Yes, live events are still important to TV networks and they'll pay out the nose for them because most of their other content is being digested after the fact. There's also the idea of - well, what the hell else is ESPN or Turner going to air? More Hockey? More Law and Order? The money has to go to some kind of programming or they'll be out of business.
So you can say that it doesn't matter that they're losing viewership because the NBA is still making lots of money via this avenue. That's a fair point. But they're still seeing their viewership and fanbase dwindle even though the US population has grown. This TV deal may be great, but how sustainable is that? How many more viewers can the NBA lose until that becomes not a good deal for the networks?
I never said it was. Still, it seems relevant to the NBA's business model and the growth of the game that people aren't watching cable and a good chunk of the league's fans in places like Memphis won't be able to to see their local team's games.
This would seem to be pretty bad for baseball and basketball, no? I get that there are offsetting factors, but this is not great for leagues that heavily monetize their (overly) long schedules.
Well beyond my knowledge but ostensibly this seems like a distribution problem and specifically who pays for what.
That said there is clearly demand for live sports and the people who monetize that stuff seem to think the eyeballs are valuable based on how broadcast rights trade. But the economics of streaming rights and how its all rationalized is probably best left to experts. I bet we have some too.
Here's an athletic article on the state of the NBA in terms of overall popularity: https://theathletic.com/4154687/2023/02/06/nba-tv-viewership-audience-rsn/ (subscription may be required). Four things it points out.
(1) First and foremost, the NBA is going to get a TV contract(s) that is(are) likely multiples of what it's current contract pays. That's one indicator of healthiness.
(2) NBA has a significant social media presence and while it's not clear how that will be monetized, the article does point out that it helps to create life-long plans who are willing to buy merch and go to games when older.
(3) In terms of attendance, the league says that "its teams are playing to 96 percent capacity in arenas so far this season, which is up 6 percent over last year, and the 470 sellouts are 170 more than the same point in 2021-22. "
(4) Finally, while the AS game ratings are down, that's probably because that game stinks. Other metrics have the NBA flat or growing. For example:
- While national games are up slightly (1%) in total viewers and are flat in Nielsen ratings (0.9), those games are averaging a 3.0 share, which is up 11 percent over the same number of games from last season. I.e., flat is great in an era of declining viewership
- NBA games on Xmas averaged 4.31 million viewers on ABC and ESPN — a 5 percent year-over-year gain despite the competition.
- The Boston Celtics’ overtime win over the Los Angeles Lakers on Jan. 28 — which included the now-infamous missed foul call on LeBron James at the end of regulation — averaged 3.7 million viewers to make it the best non-Christmas “NBA Saturday Primetime on ABC” game in three years. That game package is averaging 3.4 million viewers, which is up 16 percent over last season, the league said.
- While aggregate RSN viewership is down 5 percent, but the share of people watching NBA games via an RSN is up 15 percent over last season and the 16 teams that have local TV deals through Sinclair’s Diamond Sports Group channels are collectively up nearly 20 percent in year-over-year viewership, per the league.
The NBA is pretty healthy right now. Thanks God.
The NBA said it averages more 1 million-plus viewership nights in a season than any other U.S. major league, and it has games and content on more than 250 nights a year, which will appeal to streaming services.
This is something that logically makes sense but we don't really know that kids who have grown up watching NBA highlights and clips on YT or TikTok or whatever will have the same kind of interest in spending money on the product as people of prior generations. One would think that people who grew up taking less of a time incentive in the NBA would be less likely to want to spend hundreds of dollars on tickets than people who grew up where more of a time commitment was necessary.
Once again, the Cs ownership paid ~$360mm for the team back in 2002 and Forbes had the club valued at ~$4B back before the season began and the Suns transaction happened (in that Sarver earned 10x on a $401mm purchase back in 2004).
Now this isn't to suggest that valuations will keep going up nor should anyone assume it will be at the same rate. The point is that those who have an ownership interest may not agree that the premise of that interesting piece linked upthread (thank you btw). From a player and ownership perspective, the league feels fairly healthy.
Now this isn't to suggest that valuations will keep going up nor should anyone assume it will be at the same rate. The point is that those who have an ownership interest may not agree that the premise of that interesting piece linked upthread (thank you btw). From a player and ownership perspective, the league feels fairly healthy.
@wade boggs chicken dinner That's a good post. I don't have an athletic sub, but I generally knew the information you outlined. My counter would be this:
So it's kind of like "I lost 60% of my life savings, but I'm back up 15%, so things are good again" - yeah, they're doing better than last year, which was better than the year before, but that's because their bottom was so low.
As you can see from the graph, there are a lot of ebbs and flows with viewership, and the NBA can definitely rebound, and perhaps it's on its way to rebounding. That would be great.
But overall, I don't think it helps to only paint a rosy picture. It's not all good, it's not all bad, but we and the league should admit that there are areas where the league can significantly improve. Things like making it so star players actually play in games during the regular season (or at least have players and teams pretend like the regular season matters would be a great start) or maybe viewing the in-person experience as a loss leader for the business to grow their fanbase. I don't have the answers, but the basic premise that the NBA isn't really growing so much as they're trying to maintain a dwindling audience seems to be fairly accurate when you zoom out past a one year horizon to a five or ten year horizon.
So it's kind of like "I lost 60% of my life savings, but I'm back up 15%, so things are good again" - yeah, they're doing better than last year, which was better than the year before, but that's because their bottom was so low.
As you can see from the graph, there are a lot of ebbs and flows with viewership, and the NBA can definitely rebound, and perhaps it's on its way to rebounding. That would be great.
But overall, I don't think it helps to only paint a rosy picture. It's not all good, it's not all bad, but we and the league should admit that there are areas where the league can significantly improve. Things like making it so star players actually play in games during the regular season (or at least have players and teams pretend like the regular season matters would be a great start) or maybe viewing the in-person experience as a loss leader for the business to grow their fanbase. I don't have the answers, but the basic premise that the NBA isn't really growing so much as they're trying to maintain a dwindling audience seems to be fairly accurate when you zoom out past a one year horizon to a five or ten year horizon.
Can’t you look at the Sneaker market as evidence of this occuring? Guys like Austin Reeves and Bones Hyland are being sought after to sign sneaker deals. It’s pretty nuts out there.
Yes, it definitely has been an amazing 20 years for the league, and I don't think things are about to crater. As noted by others here, it seems that the next TV deal will be very large.
That said, you don't have to squint too hard to see strong headwinds on the horizon. Good leadership is monitoring and getting out ahead of such things, and I would be willing to bet that the owners and players will be a bit slow to adjust, given how good things have been.
I don't know anything about the sneaker market but would say that is a symptom of collectibles in general growing in interest. I still don't know if that can be used an example to show young people are spending money on the NBA at the same rate as older fans. I don't think there is a problem with the NBA being interesting to younger fans, but more a question of can they get those younger fans to contribute where they would make the most revenue (which for the NBA, is watching games on TV).
They are only up YoY because the new out-of-home viewership metric is artificially boosting the TV ratings. Ratings are down a lot since the peak Warriors years, and the drop is outpacing the decrease in cable subs.
The NBA is also not close to being able to monetize social media, and GenZ is more likely to watch some random Overtime high school basketball content than current highlights.
Points:
TV viewership is a partial means to an end. It is not the end goal here in and of itself. It is merely one of many tools the league has to pursue customer lifetime value.
"oh they have to buy some content, they have to have something to show people" yeah well let me assure you, the staff at the pro ultimate frisbee league would accept a far lower price from ESPN and Turner than the NBA is asking for. Why do ESPN and Turner choose to pay such a high price to specifically get the NBA, and why are others lining up to outbid them next chance they get? Because the NBA is such a better product, reaches such a better audience and does so in a much more valuable way. Not all broadcasted content is equal, and we have to infer its value from the price people are willing to pay for it - or at least reckon with that as a value signal.
So when the article posted goes on about all of this drivel...
Oh, load management of stars is killing the league, is it? And your reasoning is that it is affecting the watchability of games, which are continuing to sell out while they hike the prices and yet build other revenue streams faster than in-person is growing? So the NBA should reduce the number of games in the season, taking a proportional pro-rata hit to nearly all their revenue streams (just about everything except merch, since even things like placement sponsorships are going to be priced proportional to impressions), just for the sake of reducing load management so that the people who already can't get tickets to all the sellouts will have an incrementally better experience?
With apologies to @Old Fart Tree , it makes me wonder what the hell they're teaching over there at Kellogg, because this was just about the most poorly-reasoned piece of business analysis I've seen. Maybe a career at Microsoft and Apple working on apps and growth marketing doesn't make one an expert on forecasting the economics of sports leagues.
Yeah, Ben, a lot of people got into Formula 1 from watching Drive To Survive. The NBA... is also a sport. The useful comparisons just about stop there. I have my criticisms of the NBA and would tinker around the edges (Elam ending!), but I have seen absolutely no evidence that Silver / the owners lack any understanding about what they're doing, or how they're going to continue growing. Most particularly, they seem better-positioned to weather the storm of cable collapsing than just about any other media property. Thompson spends a lot of words arguing that ESPN is going to end up being a bad business model in 20 years, and the RSNs along with it. Yeah, and? What is his estimated impact on the NBA itself? If those numbers looked dire, he'd share them. We can infer a lot that he didn't - both that they can't be that bad, and also that he's something of an idiot for not even making an attempt to connect his big essay sections to his main thesis.
- The demand to attend an NBA game vastly exceeds the supply. NBA arenas are all capacities between 16k-21k, and even the ones built most recently (Warriors 2019, Bucks 2018) are not pushing the capacity envelope. Teams care more about that there be an atmosphere at games than they do maximizing gate revenue. They would rather the present state of ~19k sellouts than double the capacity (= people farther from the floor) with only 70-80% attendance.
- This is partly because gate revenue is so minor to NBA teams. Over the last decade, MLB has gone from tickets being 38% of their revenue to ~28% today; with the NBA, it's at 22% and has been (pandemic aside) since about 2016. NHL 37%, NFL ~16% (!).
- Instead they have, of course, focused on other ways to consume their content, and frankly push the envelope with how much reach they can achieve on social media. NBA Twitter is orders-of-magnitude bigger, more dynamic and more entertaining than the twitter communities for any other sport, soccer included. Views of clips and highlights are monetized, but also they meet the customer where they are in terms of time commitment. It's choose-your-own-adventure. To borrow Thompson's model: through their choices, the NBA is able to serve both SuperFan and CasualFan very ably through social media, in a manner that will survive CasualFan cutting the cable cord. As such, the total engagement generates / preserves a lot more customer lifetime value than it might appear if just trying to measure by directly-attributed purchases or whatever - and measuring that full effect is devilishly hard.
- Any attempt to ignore the brand-association value of the NBA, with its cultural cachet and relative immunity from negative associations, will inevitably undervalue the fanbases. And there are a lot more people abroad going around wearing NBA jerseys than there are MLB, NFL or NHL jerseys (and domestically, surely they're second only to the NFL). NBA fandom is a greater part of people's self-identity than other sports - I can compare it only to European football. The mention of the shoe market above reinforces this point too.
- The NBA Finals ratings is such a red herring, that the extent to which the article builds its case off of that makes one suspect the author has an axe to grind. It's not the super bowl, where unaffiliated fans and plenty of non-fans are going to take it in anyway. It's mostly for the fans of the two teams, and the ratings say more about the relative distribution of consumption channels than they do about popularity or trajectory. Where in that assessment are the numbers of people who streamed the game? Caught highlights later? Watched on NBA League Pass? Nowhere that I see. At least start from the set of playoff games, which amount to ~20% of the total nationally-televised games in a year. Focusing on the Finals feels like cherry-picking.
- And the All-Star game even moreso. The ASG is not recruiting incremental fans or generating incremental revenue except via the in-person stuff. It is a blip on the radar, one data point among thousands, and less valuable a data point than the rest, at that.
(in fairness, things like "NBA Christmas games are up 5%" are cherry-picking too, I discount all of that and instead buy the argument that "TV ratings are a little down over the last decade", and am arguing that it doesn't matter as to the health of the league)
Objection, facts not in evidence. They've poured a steadily-increasing amount of media-staff time and attention into promoting the social experience. And they have access to the data from partners that demonstrate the value of this. So while the direct monetization (of social media views) is probably not a huge fraction, the indirect monetization is, I think the default assumption has to be, quite substantial and growing rapidly.
TV viewership is a partial means to an end. It is not the end goal here in and of itself. It is merely one of many tools the league has to pursue customer lifetime value.
You have jumped from "TV ratings are down a bit" to "they're seeing their fanbase dwindle", without any attempt to connect the two. And social media is a big counterargument to the idea that there is a connection there. Among other indicators we have, like the sponsorship volume / revenue. The fact that the TV contracts keep going up should itself be evidence enough that the broadcast partners, and the advertisers behind them, see a huge and growing amount of value in reaching NBA eyeballs, which overwhelms any effect from ratings or cord-cutting.
"oh they have to buy some content, they have to have something to show people" yeah well let me assure you, the staff at the pro ultimate frisbee league would accept a far lower price from ESPN and Turner than the NBA is asking for. Why do ESPN and Turner choose to pay such a high price to specifically get the NBA, and why are others lining up to outbid them next chance they get? Because the NBA is such a better product, reaches such a better audience and does so in a much more valuable way. Not all broadcasted content is equal, and we have to infer its value from the price people are willing to pay for it - or at least reckon with that as a value signal.
So when the article posted goes on about all of this drivel...
...I'm forced to conclude that Ben Thompson was lying at the top when he said "the love of my sports life is basketball, particularly the NBA", and whether he's lying to himself or just to us is almost immaterial. The game had intentional fouling and flopping in decades past (frankly more of it than today), it had "endless timeouts", if you're focused on shit like that than you're just not arguing in good faith. Shit, the league recently reduced the number of timeouts per game. And if you're looking at the stability of the finances and the growth curve thereof - DON'T YOU WANT TO SEE THEM EARNING THEIR TV PARTNERS SOME AD REVENUE?! Like, it's totally an argument out of both sides of his mouth. The goalposts are shifting all over the place throughout that article.
Oh, load management of stars is killing the league, is it? And your reasoning is that it is affecting the watchability of games, which are continuing to sell out while they hike the prices and yet build other revenue streams faster than in-person is growing? So the NBA should reduce the number of games in the season, taking a proportional pro-rata hit to nearly all their revenue streams (just about everything except merch, since even things like placement sponsorships are going to be priced proportional to impressions), just for the sake of reducing load management so that the people who already can't get tickets to all the sellouts will have an incrementally better experience?
With apologies to @Old Fart Tree , it makes me wonder what the hell they're teaching over there at Kellogg, because this was just about the most poorly-reasoned piece of business analysis I've seen. Maybe a career at Microsoft and Apple working on apps and growth marketing doesn't make one an expert on forecasting the economics of sports leagues.
Yeah, Ben, a lot of people got into Formula 1 from watching Drive To Survive. The NBA... is also a sport. The useful comparisons just about stop there. I have my criticisms of the NBA and would tinker around the edges (Elam ending!), but I have seen absolutely no evidence that Silver / the owners lack any understanding about what they're doing, or how they're going to continue growing. Most particularly, they seem better-positioned to weather the storm of cable collapsing than just about any other media property. Thompson spends a lot of words arguing that ESPN is going to end up being a bad business model in 20 years, and the RSNs along with it. Yeah, and? What is his estimated impact on the NBA itself? If those numbers looked dire, he'd share them. We can infer a lot that he didn't - both that they can't be that bad, and also that he's something of an idiot for not even making an attempt to connect his big essay sections to his main thesis.
@InstaFace I didn't post that article nor did I respond to it. I responded to a poster who posted about social media success.
I'm not sure what "facts aren't in evidence" - Jesus, what a condescending way to post - but you're essentially taking NBA PR spin and presenting it as fact. I'm not going to go point by point because I have a job to do, but you pushing aside the two premier events on the NBA calendar - all-star weekend and the NBA finals - as insignificant to the overall health of the sport seems pretty silly. You seem to think these ratings rank below your two made up metrics of "Twitter communities built" and "jerseys seen abroad." Okay.
I'm sure the league is thrilled that fans would rather watch a highlight of a game on twitter rather than watching the full game live on TNT. It's a totally sustainable foundation for a sports league. No more work needs to be done by the NBA. They're good.
I'm not sure what "facts aren't in evidence" - Jesus, what a condescending way to post - but you're essentially taking NBA PR spin and presenting it as fact. I'm not going to go point by point because I have a job to do, but you pushing aside the two premier events on the NBA calendar - all-star weekend and the NBA finals - as insignificant to the overall health of the sport seems pretty silly. You seem to think these ratings rank below your two made up metrics of "Twitter communities built" and "jerseys seen abroad." Okay.
I'm sure the league is thrilled that fans would rather watch a highlight of a game on twitter rather than watching the full game live on TNT. It's a totally sustainable foundation for a sports league. No more work needs to be done by the NBA. They're good.
