While LeBron James and Jimmy Butler have produced jaw-dropping performances in this year’s NBA Finals between the LA Lakers and Miami Heat, television viewership figures for basketball’s greatest spectacle have remained dismally low.
While Game One of last year’s NBA Finals drew in a television audience of 13.4 million people, Game One of this year’s Finals had just 7.41 million viewers, according to the Sports Watch Media website and Yahoo! Sports. Game Two of the 2020 NBA Finals drew in 5.94 million viewers, paling in comparison to last year’s audience of 6.61 million people.
While there are several popular opinions surrounding the possible reasons for this decline in viewership, most industry experts attribute the latest decline in television ratings to the schedule disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Game One of this year’s NBA Finals clashed with Major League Baseball playoff games involving the New York Yankees and the Los Angeles Dodgers, while Game Three overlapped with the NFL’s traditional “Sunday Night Football”.
“Going up head-to-head with the NFL and MLB post-season is a first, and the competition has had a negative effect on audience delivery,” media consultant Brad Adgate explained.
Former Fox Sports executive Patrick Crakes agreed with this statement, explaining, “It represents a highly fractionalized environment that is atypical for the NBA to air their finals in, against some pretty steep competition.”
