Writer: Varun Venkatesh
The NBA is not running out of highlights. It is running out of viewers. In the U.S., ratings have steadily declined over the past decade, even as league revenue, team valuations, and player salaries have exploded. This disconnect is more than a peculiarity of consumer behavior: it is a structural mismanagement of the league’s endless resources and reach capabilities.
Despite a record-setting $76 billion media rights deal in 2024 (ESPN), national broadcasts are struggling to match expectations. NBA games on ESPN and TNT averaged 1.53M viewers in the 2024–25 season, down 2% from the past year. This is part of a larger trend that dates back over a decade. The underlying paradox? As fewer people tune in, the league generates more revenue.
The value of live sports in a fractured media landscape has skyrocketed. Streaming wars and declining cable subscriptions have made live events one of the few remaining tools to guarantee real-time viewership, prompting streaming networks to pay a premium for sports rights. Furthermore, global expansion, new sponsorships, and high-margin digital ventures like the NBA League Pass allow the league to monetize beyond traditional domestic audiences, turning attention away from U.S. ratings as the core performance metric.
The Bubble Was Predicted
This peculiar imbalance between NBA viewership and the league’s value did not come out of nowhere. Back in 2016, experts warned that the skyrocketing significance of TV rights, fueled by the increasing cost of cable television service, was forming a “sports bubble” (Medium) where the value of sports media deals inflates rapidly, tethered to bidding wars and the scarcity of live content rather than audience size or engagement. Between 2013-2016, ESPN alone had already lost over 10 million subscribers (The Spun).
The media model, built on the back of bundled cable packages and legacy contracts, meant networks paid leagues like the NBA enormous sums of money not to attract viewers, but to retain subscribers. As cord-cutting accelerated and audiences divided themselves across streaming platforms, the cracks began to show: the NBA’s financial growth was still being driven by a model increasingly out of sync with how fans actually consume the game.
As such, by 2017, TV declines across all major sports were seen (Kaggle): NBA viewership was down 8%, NHL down 11%, and NFL down 17% (Variety). All these plunges outpaced the trends of general TV viewership decline. The issue was not fans losing interest in watching sports. It was fans changing how they consumed them. Millennials and Gen Z were not sitting down for full games, instead watching highlights, following storylines on social media, and catching buzzer-beaters on YouTube. The problem was never demand—it was fragmented attention.
Today’s younger audiences are immersed in a media environment that rewards speed and interactivity. Apps like TikTok and Instagram Reels serve short-form personalized content, making traditional broadcasts—slow-paced and quite linear—struggle to compete effectively. Average attention spans have declined over the past two decades (Golden Steps), not from a decrease in interest, but because users are trained to process and jump between streams of information rapidly. This does not mean that younger viewers do not care about sports: it means they engage differently, demanding formats that meet them where they are.
Cord-Cutting Breaks the Business Model
The NBA’s business structure did not evolve fast enough. Even today, its nationally streamed games air on disjointed cable networks—ESPN, TNT, and ABC— with many local broadcasts tied to regional sports networks (RSNs). This fragmented delivery system increasingly alienated viewers, especially considering shifting streaming habits. The 2023 collapse of Bally Sports (Forbes), the largest regional sports network, only accelerated this shift. When Bally filed for bankruptcy and dropped broadcasting rights for several teams, many cable subscribers who primarily watch basketball games realized they could no longer access them. Without the RSN tie-in, there remained little reason to hold on to expensive cable packages, pushing even more viewers to cut the cord.
But dropping cable did not mean fans could suddenly stream their favorite team. Due to RSN contracts, NBA League Pass—the league’s official streaming platform—blacks out local games. That means if you live in the same market as your team, you can’t watch them live on League Pass. It’s an outdated system designed to protect RSN exclusivity, but in the streaming era, it leaves fans with no legitimate option to watch their home team unless they re-subscribe to a specific RSN through cable or a rare streaming bundle. Frustration grew: fans either turned to illegal streaming sites or stopped watching entirely.
In 2023, the Phoenix Suns became the first team to break away from their RSN altogether and started airing games on free over-the-air TV, plus a direct-to-consumer app (Boardroom). The result? They tripled their audience reach. However, it is important to recognize that this was not a strategic move, but a last-resort one to survive.
Graphic By: Bryan Xiao
A Decade of Decline Pushes Viewers into Piracy
The downward trajectory is long and clear. According to On Si, National NBA broadcasts on ABC averaged 2.95 million viewers in 2019–20, a 45% drop from the 5.42 million viewers in 2011–12. TNT fell 40% in that time, and ESPN nearly 20%. While other sports like the NFL and MLB maintained or grew their audiences, the NBA shrank. A key reason for that decline is the league’s accessibility. As noted earlier, with fans unable to reliably watch their favorite teams, the NBA’s slow adaptation to shifting media consumption habits left casual viewers behind and pushed loyal ones into frustration or fragmentation.
Exacerbating the problem, piracy has become a mainstream choice for viewers due to access issues and high streaming costs. In 2024, 17 million people pirated the Super Bowl. But for the NBA, whose fan base skews younger and more tech-savvy, piracy is much more prevalent. In January 2019, sports piracy websites saw over 363 million visits (Jipel), with Reddit’s now-banned r/NBAStreams community being a hub. Even after its removal, piracy persists via sites like Methstreams and Crackstreams—the latter drawing 800 million views before its shutdown in 2024 (Sportico). Today, StreamEast serves as the epicenter for sports piracy.
Indeed, according to Queen’s Business Review, younger fans pirate more. 30% of viewers aged 18–24 report regularly pirating sports, compared to just 4% of those 35+. That is a generational shift in perceived value.
The Revenue Paradox
Yet, the league is flush with cash (shown in Figure 1). International rights, sponsorships, streaming partnerships, and digital monetization (e.g., NFTs, esports, global merchandising) are outpacing TV ad dollars. While domestic TV viewership has fallen, player salaries have soared, and the salary cap has surged, all fueled by this diversified model. But that doesn’t mean the U.S. viewership crisis doesn’t matter. It’s a signal of a weakening cultural grip.
Figure 1
NBA commissioner Adam Silver has acknowledged that TV ratings are “down a bit,” but insists it’s a broader trend across television. He’s not wrong—Nielsen ratings for 2018-19 showed primetime viewership across major broadcast networks averaged 28.5 million, a 20% decline since 2014-15. Among adults 18-49, the drop was even steeper: a 35% fall in ratings. Silver frames the NBA’s ratings slide as a symptom of technological evolution rather than league mismanagement.
With streaming now accounting for 42% of all TV viewing as of 2024, the NBA has leaned into digital growth. In 2025 alone, the league’s digital content drew 83.5 billion views, a 41% year-over-year increase (Front Office Sports). The new media deal reflects this pivot, featuring games on both NBC (broadcast) and Amazon Prime (streaming).
Still, the NBA’s decline in traditional viewership far outpaces broader TV trends. While primetime fell 20% over four years, national NBA broadcasts dropped by over 40% across the past decade (talkSport). That suggests more than just shifting technology—it points to structural friction in how fans access games. Amazon Prime, like Thursday Night Football in the NFL, brings modernity but also barriers: it’s behind a paywall. NBC may help recapture lost ground, but unless blackout rules and accessibility improve, the NBA risks leaving behind the very fans it’s trying to reach.
Scheduling, Stars, and Storylines
There is also the matter of the product itself. Load management, injuries, and long seasons have made regular-season games feel disposable. In 2017, experts warned that without urgency, fans would drift toward bite-sized content (McKinsey and Company). Unfortunately, that has happened. Today, many fans skip full games, instead engaging through 30-second highlight clips on TikTok, graphics on X, and Instagram story updates. These snippets satisfy the desire for spectacle without requiring the time commitment of watching an entire game.
Urgency, meanwhile, is not a lost cause: it is something that can be manufactured. The NFL thrives on scarcity: a 17-game season where every matchup matters. The NBA could borrow from this principle by restructuring the calendar, incentivizing in-season rivalries and performance in the All-Star Game, or expanding formats like the new In-Season Tournament. Until something sparks a sense that this game truly matters, fans will continue to tune out, except when the algorithm tells them otherwise.
Indeed, this is confirmed by the 2024–25 season’s turnaround. After a dismal start, NBA ratings nearly fully recovered by this season’s end. ABC viewership was up 10% thanks to a five-game Christmas Day slate (Awful Announcing). The lesson? Big games, broad distribution, better timing: they still work.
The NBA is not a league in freefall; it is a league in transition. If the NBA embraces wide access, dismantles blackouts, and continues innovating with global streaming and fan interaction, it can reengage viewers. Dismantling blackout restrictions, especially on League Pass, will allow fans to actively watch teams they live close to. As the league continues innovating with global streaming, alternate broadcasts, fan voting integrations, and social media engagement, it can expand the game’s cultural footprint far beyond what it had with cable.
It may not bring fans back to traditional television. But it can bring them back into the NBA ecosystem: into streams, apps, clips, fantasy leagues, and merch drops. The fans haven’t vanished. They have just logged off.
Featured Image by Edgar Chaparro on Unsplash
