The NBA’s business is doing quite well. If you’re a basketball purist, who likes the game at its most beautiful and competitive, this might confuse you, because 2016’s postseason has seen a historic proportion of blowout victories, and a lot of non-basketball squabbling and wrestling involving stricken genitalia, thrown mouthguards, puerile debates about snitching and manliness, and an Eastern Conference so predictably dominated by LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers that they should soon expect to face antitrust accusations.
Intrigue in the league abounds, however, with the numbers showing it clearly. Since taking over broadcast rights to the NBA Finals in 2003, ABC has never seen as good of ratings as they have during this year’s bout between LeBron’s Cavs and the Steph Curry’s Golden State Warriors. This after the network set a regular-season ratings high—by a lot—when Curry and Co. squared off against Kevin Durant and the Oklahoma City Thunder in a memorable mid-season game in February.
Curry, who has taken the league by storm in his back-to-back MVP seasons, has a futuristic shooting range that’s inspired a generation of pre-teens to chuck dozens of shots from far-off neighbors’ driveways daily, and the breathtaking nature of his game can’t be overstated. He has played poorly in these playoffs, though, and a lot of casual fans tuning in to validate the hype around his ascension may be feeling let down by what they see from him. Incumbent top celebrity James, for his part, had not played a game featuring competitive tension until the Finals began.
Fandom is obviously growing, though. The uptick in ratings is a testament to many tough-to-trace factors, but the remarkable power of the modern superstar is probably chief among them. Of the aforementioned James, Durant and Curry, Steph is the newest top-tier attention magnet, and it’s telling that he plays for a team whose moniker doesn’t explicitly reference an actual city. Locals of Oakland, the Warriors adopted their current name in 1971 in order to represent their entire state. But to fans, Curry and his superstar ilk represent a concept detached from either geography, anyway, or even franchise history for that matter. Durant and the almost equally famous Russell Westbrook, for instance, play in Oklahoma City, the country’s 27th most populous city, for an organization that literally did not exist before both players arrived for its birth eight years ago. The lack of market size or antiquity has not stopped them from being two of the most marketable athletes on the planet.
What current NBA fans seem drawn to is a particular type of self that the league hosts, harmonious with shifting senses of economics and communication. We are drunk on the spectacle of men who are business unto themselves, businesses that spawn smaller businesses. We hang on their comings and goings, what they think of each other, how they interact and live when we can and can’t see them. That curiosity is what’s loaded into the many moments between whistles that have stolen the spotlight in these playoffs; more was made of LeBron stepping over Draymond Green at mid-court, and the ensuing series of micro-aggressions and bodily gestures, than has been made of any shot. Or of Curry losing his cool in Game 6, and hitting a fan with a mouthguard thrown in frustration. In a glance, a lean, in words muttered that would require expert lip-readers to interpret, we hope to see what individuals with such vast scalability are really like.
One of the other main, non-basketball events of these Finals, as such, was the release of Curry’s new shoes. The launch of widely ridiculed “Chef” Curry II low sneakers, on the eve of Game 4, acted as the most visible in a succession of schadenfreude-tinged backlashes against the MVP. For the weekend following the Warriors’ 108-97 win to put them up 3-1 in the series, the competition shifted from the series to the gaggle of social media users and public personalities vying for the best joke about the dad-first, tragically unhip footwear. This was Curry’s biggest loss since claiming the mainstream throne of the sport, and it was not a basketball loss, but a branding loss.
The Finals are now heading to a Game 7, and that’s a huge win for the league and everyone involved in their business. There’s little doubt that the ratings for the game will be even better than what they’ve seen thus far, and perhaps historically so. But to say this has been a competitive series would be a bit misleading, as the games have been decided by an average of 19.7 points. Game 4, a 108-97 Warriors victory in Cleveland, might be the only game in which you could say both teams played well, but even that night was stolen by Green and James’ exchange of testicular etiquette. While there are space-age strides being made in the way NBA basketball is played, and while these Finals have seen some dazzling individual performances from James and Kyrie Irving, it’s clear that the quality of play is not what has fans leaning in. Culture, not basketball, is the NBA’s leading export.