What’s the Matter With the NBA?

Could the NBA finally be paying the price for its woke ways?

It’s certainly paying the price for something. The early-season TV numbers tell the tale. Across the networks with rights to broadcast league games, ESPN, TNT, and ABC, viewership is down 18 percent so far this year. That number includes the much-hyped NBA Cup, a pointless in-season tournament for which franchises repaint their floors in wild colors to inject excitement into their games. The numbers for that fiasco are down double digits from its inaugural iteration one year ago, and its final game this year drew approximately 1.5 million fewer viewers than last year’s final — 2.99 million to 4.58 million.

The downward trend is mere exacerbation to what amounts to a decade-long drop in TV ratings. Since 2012, viewership for the league has declined by 48 percent, and of the five most sparsely viewed NBA Finals of the past 30 years, four have come in the last four years.

Whether the recent dip is due to woke ways is up for debate. The “woke” part of that question is not in doubt, though. The NBA, the wokest of American sports leagues, has been leading the outrage parade since 2012 — since LeBron James and teammates donned hoodies to honor Trayvon Martin.

Then came slogans scribed on players’ shoes and the backs of game uniforms — like “Say Their Names” or “I Can’t Breathe” — followed by much somber national-anthem kneeling and courts emblazoned with “Black Lives Matter” slogans during the “bubble” playoffs in 2020. Shortly after the death of Jacob Blake, a black man who was shot by police in an altercation in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in 2020, the entire league canceled games when players boycotted.

James, the de facto commissioner of wokery in the league, has since shown his true political colors. In 2021 he tweeted an anti-police message after a Columbus, Ohio cop shot a woman who was lunging at another woman with a knife, thus saving the latter’s life; James’s tweet included a picture of one of the involved policemen with the message “You’re next #Accountability,” ostensibly predicting a fate for the officer similar to that of Derek Chauvin, of George Floyd ignominy.

He dispatched mocking tweets about Kyle Rittenhouse’s witness-stand tears. He was all-in for Barack Obama’s and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaigns, and he and Stephen Curry, who is almost as glam as James, and the latter’s highly successful coach, Steve Kerr, all verbally supported Kamala Harris during the 2024 campaign.

Such blatant partisanship, and wokery, turns off at least one large cohort of American sports fans — conservatives. For over a decade the NBA has thrown these woke antics in the face of conservative sports fans. It’s no wonder the league’s viewership numbers are down.

League president Adam Silver acknowledges the league’s dismal ratings but pins the blame on shifting viewing patterns. “Ratings are down a bit,” he admitted, but “cable television is down double digits.” Many viewers are moving to streaming services, which accounts for the dip in cable viewing, and Silver plumped the league’s forthcoming contract with Amazon Prime Video.

Lots of Reasons

Silver’s view is an outlier, however. Everybody — NBA stars, ex-NBA stars, pundits, average fans — has a take on the league’s tanking numbers.

And all opinions point directly to the product on the floor. There are too many regular-season games, is one criticism. Said Ethan Strauss, who writes about the NBA on his House of Strauss Substack, “There’s just too much awareness that an individual game really doesn’t matter — that an individual game is one out of 82 and it’s important not to get injured, and it’s important to be there for the postseason.”

Joel Embiid, star of the Philadelphia 76ers, vowed never to play in the second game of a back-to-back. Kawhi Leonard, another star, has frequently sat on the bench for entire games even when healthy — simply to conserve himself for the postseason.

There’s a name for this practice — it’s called “load management.” Coach Gregg Popovitch popularized the strategy during the 2010s with his San Antonio Spurs, and although the league has attempted to curtail the practice, it remains popular with playoff teams and their star players.

Imagine taking your family to an NBA game, popping $50 per for the tickets, another $50 for food or souvenirs, $20 for parking, only to watch the star player sit on the bench. Talk-show host Colin Cowherd related load management to the 2024 election: “I think load management is a shame on the league. It is a really bad look for a family of four to go to a game and Giannis doesn’t play or Embiid doesn’t play. I’m sorry. Go ask the Democrats. Be warned. Once you detach from regular people in America, you will pay a price.”

Other turn-offs include player mobility between teams, making it hard for fans to form allegiance to given players who might be on the team one year and gone the next. And even the surfeit of alternate jerseys adds more ambient “noise” detracting from the main product. Teams are not required to wear their whites at home and their darks on the road, as has historically been the case, and trot onto the floor sporting the full color wheel of unis, and all varieties of names on the fronts of their jerseys. It’s disorienting to see the Celtics running onto the TD Garden floor wearing black uniforms.

Numero Uno Problemo

The real issue, arguably, is the significant uptick in the volume of three-point shots. The three has been in the pro game since the 1979–1980 season, with a line established 23 feet 9 inches away from the basket at the top and sides and 22 feet in the corners. At first shooting the three was a semi-desperate tactic, a way for a team trailing big late in a game to get back into it. In those early years, teams took fewer than five per game. In that first year, the team average for three-point attempts was 2.8.

This year it is 37. Each team launches the ball from the three-point arc, on average, 37 times a game. The Boston Celtics throw it up there from distance 51 times a game.

The fact that every team relies so heavily on the three-ball makes for one-dimensional basketball. Opines Joe Kinsey on Outkick:

If you like guys chucking up bricks and running up and down the court like they’re at a YMCA, the current NBA is for you. The league is attempting an absurd 37.5 threes per game. If that number holds, it will set an all-time high, besting the 35.2 3PA record from the 2021–22 season. For comparison, the NBA was attempting 22.4 threes per game a decade ago. The current league 3-point shooting percentage sits at .359%.

That latter number is the real problem. Players are shooting more from distance, true, but they’re making more of those shots. Forty-eight players this year are converting over 40 percent of their three-balls.

Any NBA coach that doesn’t have his team firing up 30 or more of these bombs per game should be fired. They represent the most efficient way of scoring points. Once a three-point shot is made 33 percent of the time, it is as valuable as a two-point attempt made 50 percent of the time. Very few teams shoot 50 percent from two, but the league as a whole shoots almost 36 percent from three.

That’s why it’s raining threes.

The fact is, three points is too great a reward for making the shot. To bring the game into balance, to return the mid-range jumper to prominence, the three-point basket must be devalued.

Many “solutions” to the problem have been proffered, some legit, some fanciful — like allowing home teams to draw the line wherever they wanted, or allowing goaltending on threes, or making the three worth 2.5 points.

The obvious solution is to move the line back. Analytics have advanced to the point that every shot taken in an NBA game can be located on the court. If an optimal rate of three-point conversion is 33.33 percent — making every shot taken worth one point — analytics could provide sufficient data to allow the league to place the line at exactly the distance where 33.33 percent of shots were converted.

Wrote Kirk Goldsberry, who has been studying the issue for a decade, in 2019: “Where would the line have to be so that the cumulative set of NBA 3-point tries would go in 33.33 percent of the time? … During the 2017–18 season, excluding heaves, NBA shooters made exactly 33.33 percent of their 3s from beyond 25.77 feet, a distance almost exactly two feet beyond the current line.”

Move the line two feet back and fewer shooters launch long ones, and maybe the game returns to a balanced product. That would solve the three-point dilemma.

Now, if the star players and coaches would stop spouting their political opinions at every opportunity, that would go a long way to solving its “woke” problem.

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