The NBA is one of the most popular sports leagues in the world, but it’s under an odd period where ratings aren’t reflecting the sports popularity.
Basketball is a sport that is gaining followers by the bucket load, and is one of the few sports where fans see the faces and personalities of players up close. With this, media personalities and fans have much more access to players, and the opportunity for the NBA’s growth has happened because of it. Yet the sport is reporting lower rating than every despite this access. Why?
It’s simple: NBA coverage is not advertising the league properly.
This is not in reference to any particular moment, player, person, team, or network. Most of the coverage tends to downplay the league and it’s players. Every discourse on national media is comparison to the past instead of marketing today’s game. Is today’s game perfect? No, but media doesn’t do enough to showcase its strengths, or even to show why the sport is worth watching.
In the past two years, fans have seen LeBron James break the all time scoring record, Stephen Curry is the first player to 4,000 three-point field goals, Jokic is on a historic run as the first center to average a triple double, but the discourse isn’t around their greatness, but the league being “watered down”.
The NBA is going to evolve. Rules change, styles change, the floor has expanded, it’s the not same game it was 20 years ago, and that’s okay. The problem is that a lot of the faces of basketball media spend more time criticizing players and the sport than they do covering it.
If a player plays bad, that’s one thing. If a team underperforms, that’s a story, but the way the media tends to run players into the ground or criticize them personally has to stop. If the people we trust to watch the game and analyze it don’t like the game, why would the casual fan?
NBA coverage is not advertising the league properly, but that doesn’t mean that this can’t be undone. NBA media has to promote the league, it’s players, and style of basketball. This doesn’t mean don’t criticize, but don’t spend the majority of the time attacking the sport they cover. This is precisely the reason fans started seeking independent creators in media to watch NBA coverage.
Fans want to enjoy basketball, and media needs to adjust to what is best for the sport.
Like Heavy Sports’s content? Be sure to follow us.
This article was originally published on Heavy Sports
The post The Reality of Media Coverage and NBA Ratings appeared first on Heavy Sports.