Beginning this upcoming NBA season, the 11-year, $77 billion media rights deal has mostly been viewed as a good thing. Franchise valuations are way up, and player salaries are set to skyrocket. The NBA on NBC is back with an exciting cast of announcers and analysts, and Amazon Prime is entering the space with a talented crew of fresh voices, too.
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There’s more money going around for everyone, and a diverse platform from which to watch games. There’s just one problem: fans are being priced out of actually watching the games, and that’s a problem for the NBA.
The league has been fighting a battle over ratings and how popular the sport actually is for the last few years. Given that the upcoming media rights deal is worth more than two-and-a-half times the previous one, it seems those concerns were unfounded, but if that means that many fans will no longer be able to watch the games they want, then it’s going to open up a whole new can of worms for commissioner Adam Silver.
Silver has mostly done and said the right things in his time as NBA commissioner, but he gave a truly puzzling answer earlier this week when asked about the mounting costs for fans to watch the NBA on TV. “There’s a huge amount of our content that people can essentially consume for free,” he said. “This is very much a highlights-based sport.”
Silver’s tone-deaf response was a real ‘Let them eat cake’ moment, as he suggested that fans who couldn’t afford to sign up for multiple streaming services could just watch highlights on social media. Predictably, there’s been a huge backlash to what he said.
Rachel Nichols and Chris Mannix discussed Silver’s comments on Sports Illustrated’s Open Floor NBA Show, and they sided that not only are the fans right to be angry, the league’s new broadcast partners should be upset, as well.
“He just had a meeting with the heads of NBC, Amazon and ESPN,” Mannix said. “Do you think they want to hear that? They’re not looking for fans to consume content through social media, they want fans on media, they want fans subscribing.”
“All these guys paid a premium, billions of dollars, $77 billion over 11 years. They’re not paying so someone can go on like the Amazon sports channel and catch the highlights of a game,” she added.
Further explaining the motivations of NBA’s media partners, Nichols pointed out, “They need people watching games, they need people subscribing to these streaming services and these platforms, driving ratings. I thought that was a funny answer.”
Nichols also brought up how Silver’s stance isn’t doing the league any favors as it tries to navigate an increasingly splintered media landscape. “We don’t watch one thing as a nation anymore,” Nichols said. “It’s inarguable that less people watch the NBA than they used to, just because less people watch any one thing than they used to.”
“And the question is, is leaning on the fact that you’re a highlights-oriented sport, and leaning on the fact that, ‘hey fans, come and get it on social media’, they can see Anthony Edwards dunk, is that good for the long-term health of the league. Because to me, watching an entire basketball game is what gets people invested in basketball,” the veteran analyst aptly asserted.
Using Ant-Man once again as an example, Nichols said that watching an Edwards dunk highlight won’t make people fans of the Timberwolves, at best it might result in them buying his shoes. Of Silver, she said, “I thought that was a rare misstep for someone who speaks carefully.”
Silver has typically been a commissioner who listens to feedback and is willing to make changes in order to put out the best product. Though it hasn’t been entirely successful, we’ve at least seen that in how he’s constantly tinkered with the All-Star Game format in order to find a solution.
With celebrities sitting courtside, increased amounts of luxury boxes in new stadiums and player contracts for mind-blowing amounts of money, the NBA has always catered to the elite, but it’s been a sport of the people as well. Silver would be wise to remember that.
