The NBA put its best and shiniest presents under the tree of the American television viewer on Christmas Day and America said, no thanks.
The NBA, which uses Christmas Day to showcase their best games and talent to jumpstart their season, had their gifts returned by viewers who were less than enthused.
According to DEADLINE Hollywood:
The National Basketball Association’s day-long celebration of sports led the demos, scoring a 1.1 and 3.74 million total audience for its hours-long programming for ABC and ESPN. That’s the good news – the bad news is that’s down massively from past performances. In a season where the NBA is trying to lure back fans who were turned off by last season’s overt politics and the less-stimulating bubble version of the sport, it shows there’s a lot of ground to make up.
ShowBuzz Daily reports that viewership for the Lakers-Mavs game peaked at 3.959 million. As a point of comparison, last year’s Christmas Day headlining matchup between the Lakers and Clippers averaged just under seven million.
Needless to say, that’s a humbling result for the NBA.
That poor performance reverses what had been a strong opening showing for the league during their first week back.
As Breitbart Sportss reported:
Notably absent from the Association’s Opening Night games was the dramatic and obvious social justice messaging on the court and uniforms. It also appears as though many players stood for the national anthem.
In the aftermath of the death of George Floyd, the NBA cloaked their summer restart with all types of social justice messaging. The courts at the NBA ‘bubble’ in Orlando had Black Lives Matter written on them, and the players wore jerseys with personalized social justice messages.
The awful Christmas Day ratings strongly suggest that fans have neither forgotten the NBA’s business relationship with slave-labor loving China, nor the league’s hypocritical social justice stances of last season.