‘Is the nba overrated, underrated, or properly rated? Hear me out House, I think the nba is so overrated that it might be a little underrated right now.’

I'm from Croatia, 31 years old. Gone are the days of staying up late and watching the Finals till 6 in the morning. For the last 7-8 years, it's been highlights and podcasts while I do chores 😅

Cant comment in America but in Australia it’s ridiculously popular and always growing. Internationally is insane

I generally hear people say that they only watch a few highlights here and there in the regular season and pay more attention come playoff time

The NBA is the only US major sports organization that is big here in Asia. It's crazy popular here.

This is such a good discussion. Simmons has been on an absolute heater this week.

I've been watching NBA on MAX and I dig it

I didnt even know Mark Normand followed basketball! Great Guest!

Perception is reality with advertising I suppose.

46:42 I love that his two examples were an airport or hospital and not, I dunno, a bar or restaurant.

This will be arguably an even more interesting question to ask in five years I think.

The way to save TNT is to let the NBA double sell the rights… Let the TNT crew ‘Manningcast’ the playoffs/Thursdays. Let them keep Tuesdays on cable.

I haven’t watched a lot of NBA this year until the playoffs and definitely noticed the physicality and instantly LOVED it. It’s so much more competitive and entertaining. The intensity is so high, and not just because its playoffs. I didn’t know until now that they changed up the rules and implemented “prison ball” lol

The NBA Playoffs used to smother the NHL Playoffs to the smaller NBC cable channels. Now even Turner mixes NHL and NBA Playoffs. That isn't because Hockey got more popular. I have no idea how the NBA is getting more money. The best you can say about the NBA is that it isn't dying like Men's College Basketball.

TV partners are overspending for the NBA when the ratings are extremely low

Football has a built in scarcity just based on the nature of the game. I do think as the NFL adds game after game to their schedule, it has diluted the product to me. Late in the NFL season I start to get nauseated by the league.

It’s crazy stats because I don’t watch NFL at all, so I’m in an NBA bubble and not realizing all this lol. NBA podcast clips still go the hardest online. Tops in free agency too

NBA is nothing like it used to be. Bill and Ryen are big Celtics fans, which is a great franchise that has good teams year in, year out. Most sports fans are tired of the NBA act

Better question. Is Davis Bertrans doing well?

Excellent guest and topics!!!

It's called an echo chamber, Bill.

This year has been a decent product. They definitely need expansion teams. They also need to stop stars from moving around constantly.

International fans have grown, but I have seen many of my age group (usa) not watch as much nba than they did 10 yrs ago.

Go to espn and look up the box score to Detroit vs the wizards and it will say 97-100% attendance, there is absolutely no way 15k+ turned up and paid to watch them play and this is the same for every game it’s almost always a sellout crowd no matter what. This on top of saying more people watched the play in tournament game then the finals last year was just ridiculously stupid.

iwould like to see a baseball like schedule, were we see a best of 3 series all season long

If trends continue, I would like to see discussion what happens when NBA revenue stops increasing or even reverses. Because viewership isn't doing very well and it's a clear trend now and the NBA is being saved by factors they do not control and will likely not be there in another 5-10 years.

Great show!

I personally was surprised at that 7 billion number. Its way more valued than I expected

let me get this straight, our economy sucks and the cap is going up 7 percent each year? Families in the middle class will be priced out.

I submit that the changing of the guard will bolster the NBA ... Add to that the success of the 'Nova Knicks - with three guys with championship college pedigree playing together for three years, I believe - coupled with a evolving NIL that hopefully will let college players stay longer and mature, and the increasing international influence bodes well for the Association

If Minnesota and OKC play next round it will be a real statement from the league, do we want to promote MNs physical defense or reward OKCs fouldbaiting ?

Commissioner Nosferatu.

Wholesome players who are positive influences like Brunson and the Nova 3 help the NBA project good publicity which benefits the league. NOVA3 including Brunson and his two fellow Knicks are great for theNBA😊

I’m an nba fan and you are my primary source for talking basketball. Crazy thought. Small nba deal to the ringer. Peyton manning watch live format? Hbo. No censor…. Just saying what I like to see. Garnett should be there to….

2:40 it’s because live sports is one of the few things that keeps people subscribing. A giant portion would have cut the cable long ago if it weren’t for sports.

ranking NBA rankings do it bill

Baseball and basketball are best positioned because they already have a global footprint. The NFL can push all they want, but American football is a long way from being established. Track and Field is the one to watch, mainly because the events lend themselves well to wagering and are really short, which is compatible with current attention spans.

1:30 "I wrote in 2022 a story about the NBA called, 'Half the audience, twice the profit". I don't know how valuable anyone thinks the NBA is, but it would surely be worth more if it had retained more of its audience. So the interesting question is why has it not. In my case I haven't watched any actual games in years, and that's because I think the product is trash which isn't worth paying for or enduring the announcers, etc. for, but I certainly wouldn't say that that is more than just me.

Reduce the number of regular season games so they mean more( 2 x v every team) and get rid of the insane amount of ad breaks so the games are quicker. Simple.

Fantastic

Block/charge calls should go to the FIBA model of the possession arrow

The mavs thunder game was back to the soft nba whistle. Especially in the 2nd quarter.

What software do you use for this background and split screen? Looking to start a podcast

I fell like this deal is less about traditional TV and more about where we are going. Streaming is the way forward especially for the NBA when most of its popularity is overseas, or in the online discourse. Traditional TV ratings mean less and less in 2024 and beyond, capturing the NBA on their streaming service is a means to grow each bidders user base as much as anything else. The NFL and NCAAF value is an interesting one also, as popular as they are they only play once a week and the seasons are short when its over it's not really talked about, the NBA seems to have captured the modern 24hour news cycle better than any other American sport. That's a big part of the value play in these rights for bidders.

One big thing the NBA is missing out on his fantasy sports because no one wants to draft fantasy NBA in October if they started their season at Christmas when Fantasy Football is winding down, everyone would be all in

65 games: Four 4-team divisions per conference. Play everyone in your division 3x and play everyone else 2x. Or 77 games playing everyone in your conference 3x. But I like the shorter season with more impactful games. Or actually, better yet: Two 8-team divisions per conference. Play everyone in your division 3x, and everyone else 2x, which would lead to a nice 69 game schedule

NBA should definitely drop down to 72 games. It would make every regular season game more meaningful and would also mean less travel, fewer back-to-back games for the players, and fewer injuries. Just a win-win-win all around. I'd go all the way down to 70 games, in fact.

Dofusports has never done me wrong.

Media has a great opportunity right now to start promoting the young guys for the future health of the league

Overall, i think it has been way worse than it is right now. The young talent in the league right now helps a lot. I like the changes they made to reffing it. It feels like they are tweaking things constantly, which can be annoying, but sports has always been one of my main passions, specifically football and basketball. I rarely find myself disagreeing with bill but mike trout was a bad example as someone who rarely watches mlb trout is one of like 5 players almost everyone knows..

The easiest way to shorten the season but keep the same amount of games is to split the season in half. During the split have a full in season tournament. Every team. Have a group stage.. then the 8 teams that win the group stage have an 8 team single elimination tournament like a mini march madness. Or just include every team and Make it just like the ncaa tournament.. call it the “commissioners cup” after the commissioners cup tournament ends.. you start back up for part 2 of the season then the same playoffs and nba championship. Subtract the amount of games the tournament takes from the regular season. This way you shorten the season, add an exciting tournament, cancel the all star game. This fixes the nba.

This is bill at his best

As a lifelong hoop fan I’m really loving this year - the Celtics 💯I love the officiating finally letting these boys play🔥🔥🔥💪🏿💪🏿💪🏿

Instead of in season tourey, open the season with a round robin tourney, followed by 60 games, then play in ect...

So question: Which league improved more with recent rules changes? Baseball (pitch clock and more Stolen Bases) or NBA reverting to the 1990's rules (that were rejected by fans and players once already)?

Why is the podfathers camera so shit>?

I'm glad the all star game embarrassment lit a fire under adam silver dude been letting the league turn to dog water since he came in.Unfortunately it took HIM feeling embarrassed to give us fans what we wanted which was giving some greenlight to defense

waiting for a subscriber network/channel that shows the last five minutes of each game; then i'm on board with watching basketball.

Ask Ethan how to install a bidet in your apartment bathroom.

I like the 82-game schedule because that's the way it's always been. But it's become laborious with guys sitting out, etc. I thought the in-season tournament was a joke and an attempt to make the NBA into European soccer whereby teams compete for 36 trophies. Then again I'm not the target demographic. 82 has become too much, but 44 is way too few. As Bill mentioned somewhere in that 70-75 range seems right, but you've got to make sure you see everyone come into town at last once.

I hope the new generation of players will be more hummble and respect the giants that created the league. It can't happen that an active player says he doesn't watch the games.

I rarely watch games. I keep up with them through Draftkings mainly and then I'll watch highlights on KZfaq

Seeing those numbers for the possible television deals, it doesn't matter what we think when it comes to value - the execs with Disney, Amazon, NBC vs. WBD clearly think it is. And considering basketball isn't a niche sport & is truly global where you have stars coming from everywhere in the world to play at a high level (so the cupboard will never be empty with talent) this money train, regardless of what we think, will keep running.

QQ: Why would advertisers ever accept fewer games and ad units? Increasingly frequent blowouts and lack of effort even in key playoff games are the real reason no one cares about the NBA anymore beyond game 6 or 7 of a playoff series.

Wow the arnovitz model would be so exciting

I can assure you, the old rules are still in play when OKC is on the court. It was fucking disgusting. I actually want to see The Wolves vs OKC to see how that plays out. To me having these ambiguous rule set really just allows refs far too much power. If the Wolves are going to get a foul every time an OKC player runs into them or every time Shai fakes a shot into a defenders arm they are going to be hard to beat.

It’s not a BS pod without a Daryl Morey reference.

They need more tournaments. I don’t really watch the regular season. I spend more time listening to pods and watching videos about NBA than actually watching NBA.

Does the regular season matter?

I really hope that one of these guys will read this comment because it's sad to see regular people who don't know anything about economics or money really struggling to make sense of this topic. If you don't understand the primary cause of these numbers then you will start saying things like "well these networks have less subscribers, less users, less views on nba, and because of that they are willing to pay even more now for nba". This make no sense and of course is false. The unit that these things are denominated in(the dollar) is being heavily devalued through expansion of the money supply and it started to get much worse after '08 and then worse again from 2020. Looking at numbers in nominal terms does not give you an accurate picture of the value of things whatsoever. You need to factor in the devaluation of the denominator things are priced in(the dollar) to come up with real value numbers and data. Scarce assets, like the nba, need to be measured against the dollar supply expansion. Just for instance, if an nba salary(lets say top end) were to go from 30 million to 60 million over past 5 years then in real terms that salary has stayed relatively flat(even) in actual real value. If it were to have gone from 40 million to 60 million over past 5 years then that salary actually went down in real value even though it went up a lot nominally...The answer to all this is the debasement of the denominating currency and it is the reason that people who don't understand this are not able to really make any sense whatsoever on this.

Surely you just play each team twice, once home, once away. That’s 62 games, would be great.

NBA schedule solution: You play each team in your division 4 times for a total of 16 division games. You then play every other team twice for a total of 50 games. 66 game season. It would all but eliminate back-to-backs and generally give more days between games for rest and travel. Fewer games and more rest days means there’s no reason to “load manage” star players. If these guys are struggling to hit 65 games in the current format then it shouldn’t be too much to ask that they play 60 in the new one.

If they go into this offseason advertising all 30 teams and creating a storyline for each team for fans to follow. All 32 NFL have a story to follow from the lead up to the draft until the end of the regular season.

I still love the NBA, but last few games I tried to watch were basically unwatchable because of lack of defense back and fourth from both teams. Couple that with you can watch a 10-20 min video showing every major offensive and defensive play on KZfaq, why would you spend hours and hours live? Plus who has hours and hours to spend watching live regularly?

There's levels to this

The new basketball fan mentality of only keeping up with highlights and Twitter is how we get brain dead takes like Westbrook being a top 5 PG of all time

There’s several problems I see with the NBA right now: The superstars seem non chalant/out of touch (ex: load management and the all star game), half the country is turned off because of political stances the league and it’s top stars have taken, and the product can be unwatchable at times due to lack of physicality and all the 3 point attempts. Lastly, nobody watches the regular season and there’s low interest in the playoffs right now.

People are still basing everything off TV ratings which shouldn’t be the case. Everything will go to streaming soon and that’s the metric everyone should look at. I’m pretty sure whichever companies are negotiating for these rights are looking at future growth for their streaming services

Ethan str8 outta HoopSpeak!

Ethan Sherwood Straus!!!

A million dollars a year in 1979 was a lot. A million dollars is still a lot of money to normal people Bill

I enjoy NBA media more than watching the games. Half the time when I tune into a game it’s a 20 or 30 point lead because one team is making three-pointers and the other is not. It sucks. Occasionally there’s a good game, but I grew up in the 90s and those games were a bloodbath. Very tight low scoring Maybe just hitting 100 points it’s not fun to watch teams score 130 in the regular season. The playoffs are a little better, but they just aren’t good games half the time. I’d rather hear Charles Barkley talk about it with Shaq then watch modern NBA

Alot of what you guys discussed is the reason piracy is coming back, people are getting sick everything getting stuck behind an app subscription.

Fixing the all star weekend for the nba would do so well for them male 1v1 a thing and make the first one crazy. Wemby vs Chet, Jokic vs Embiid, Durant vs ANT, Giannis vs AD , Luka vs Booker, LeBron vs Palao, Curry vs Kyrie. There'd be so much hype and seeing the old vs new would help increase everyone's stock and generate loads of stories.

Illegal streams is the reason. That is it.

they currently have a team people will buy a ticket to just see play defense. gotta be some value in that. NFL dominates the large middle country of North America, but only basketball competes with soccer on the other fully wired in 4kHD continents.

Im not watching anymore but enjoy keeping up with what is going on in the league. 82 games are too many. Playoff series are too long especially the early rounds. Not living in USA the only way to watch the few games I have time for costs way to much for me to justify. Also hard to get behind a team. I started supporting okc and it felt like within 5-6 years the whole roster had been completely gutted.

the WNBA is an interesting angle - its not a total zero throw in. there is real growth potential there. i cant remember ever seeing this much hype around the league

If most players don’t care about the regular season, why should I?

People love basketball. Ratings show it for NCAA women’s and men’s vs NBA

A lot of international viewers can’t watch because of timezones/limited selection of games broadcasted too

i would be shocked if nba tv is moved into the same studios of the mlb network and nhl network

Ratings are down, but NBA TV rights are worth more than ever?!? Square that circle…

It’s doing great. You don’t understand how many people stream on illegal streams and android boxes. Those aren’t counted in the rating. But the ad revenue and cost is factored in which is why these tv deals cost so much. Because TNT is still charging for ads as if 2 mil ppl watched the game even though on ratings it says 1 mil for example. Social media traction increases all 3rd party revenue and NBA Is biggest on socials. The game is in a great place. You think people watching in Africa are counted in thse ratings? But TNT charges through whatever African partnership/subdivision for Ads in Africa too. Not to mention the amount of illegal streams globally. It’s all factored in.

I don't know if I'll ever return to watching the NBA because of the salaries. It's how I am feeling about a lot of the pro sports. Guys who are bottom 25% are making $10M a year? Not to mention the stars are making $200M+.

Currently it's weird, they seem to be swinging and some stuff seem desperate. Changing the rules mid season after the 70 pts flurry and the all star fiasco yp the point where it seems too much now. The 180 degrss turns is too drastic. Not suspending Embiid and now Murray is a ridiculius compared to recent history

I know very few people who still regularly watch Nba anymore

nba is incredibly hard to watch even as a fan, the play stoppages are brutal. and depending on who is broadcasting the ad presentations can feel like trolling at at a certain point (looking at you espn)

Didn't the majority of the regional sports networks (Bally) go belly up because they didn't bring in enough revenue to pay the teams they made deals with? And it wasn't just the baseball teams they owed money to. They literally couldnt afford the record contracts they agreed to with MLB, NHL and the NBA from all the cord cutting people just not wanting to watch full games or tv in general any more because KZfaq, TickTock, etc shortened everyone's attention spans. Sure, the NBA may get new record contracts to replace those ones they lost with Bally, but no one on this episode seemed to consider that those contracts could just as easily go the same way as the Bally ones.

Keep doubling the price as the ratings get cut in half. What could possibly go wrong?