Instead of a methodical seven game march towards an NBA championship, the 2020 NBA Finals have turned into a methodical march to the historic depths of television watching futility.
Game 1 of the Finals brought with it the lowest viewership since 1994, and Game 2 was the lowest ever on record. But wait! That was before Game 3, which beat out Game 2 by becoming the least watched Finals game in NBA history.
Game 2 earned a paltry 4.5 million viewers, while Game 3 submarined that number by peaking at 4.395 million. Mind you, this is a nearly 70% decline from last year’s Finals numbers which included a team from Canada. Not only that, unlike this year’s audience, last year’s audience was not on lockdown and did not include the game’s best player, LeBron James.
As Breitbart’s Warner Todd Huston reports:
This horrific collapse should not be surprising after polls have found that many fans now believe that basketball is far too political.
A Sept. 2 Harris poll found that 39 percent of respondent who identified as sports fans felt that the league was too political. And another 19 percent said that they had turned off pro basketball because of the NBA’s deep links to China.
The 2020 post-COVID season launched with the heavy-handed presence of the anti-American Black Lives Matter agenda.
And the BLM agenda stayed as a constant throughout the duration of the season. While LeBron James makes more than enough money to offset the ratings hit his league will take from his social justice activism, the vast majority of the league is not nearly as financially able to do so. A factor which should make for some very interesting player meetings and union meetings before the next collective bargaining session.
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