rand wrote:bkkrh wrote:Well I could also look at it from the perspective that 16.35 is not even that far from the 2019 mark of 18.34, while last season no finals game got more than 12.31 Million viewers. Or that it's a better number than the most watched game of quite a few finals series with bigger names, including a few Lakers finals, Lebron's first finals and Shaq's finals with Orlando and Miami.
Game 7s always get a huge bump in viewership over the average of a Finals, usually 50% or more. So the fact that Game 7 of 2025 was only 12% less viewed than Game 6 of 2019 is no endorsement of your idea that attention for this Finals wasn't so poor as previously thought.
Your use of the Game 7 viewership this season to compare with the average viewership of last season's Finals is a similarly invalid comparison of apples to oranges. You should be comparing average viewership. This season's Finals averaged 10.3M viewers, last season's 11.3M and last season didn't even have a Game 7 to boost its average.
If Game 7 is discounted, this season's average drops to 9.2M, a drop in viewership of 19% vs last season -- despite the fact that Games 1-6 of 2025 were much more competitive than the average Finals game last year. This is the real accurate picture of how disinterested the public was in this season's Finals match-up. Before Game 7 pushed the average up a little bit, by average viewership it was the least watched Finals in recorded history not counting the bubble.
You're obviously not dumb, you must know how biased your take is here and I really don't understand why you and some others feel a need to deny that a Finals match-up between two of the league's small markets with no players who are real household names in America would fail to excite the public.
First off, it wasn´t meant as a biased take, or a take at all. I simply copy pasted the headline from the Real GM article without the numbers, because I didn´t see that part relevant for my point.
Yes you are right, a game 7 will be more exciting than a 4 or 5 game series that gets dominated by one team. My point is, that (as usually) the narrative on the general board was that the series will suck, that nobody cares and so on. Generally there are different ways how a Finals Series can be successfull. The the general opinion before this game was that casual fans just care about big names and big franchises, which generally seemed to be right. Well the viewership didn´t improve during the series, even though it was generally a good one, but went massively up for game 7. Now here it comes down to the glas half full/half empty perspective. I can of course say "well that´s normal for a game 7", I can also say "if people don´t care at all about the NBA unless it involves the Lakers/Lebron/Curry, they still don´t watch that game."
The question is also how it is viewed by the Broadcaster. I'd expect they are more happy that this was a competitive series that went 7 games instead of a 4-0 blowout that does better number, but they only have 57% of possible broadcast time scheduled.
So this series had in that sense at least a positive outcome from viewership perspective. The Haliburton injury is really unfortunately, if it would have been a game like Game 1 I think there is a very good chance that a lot of casual fans would be more open in the future to these type of games.
What is definitely interesting though, this thread has now barely 3 pages. Compare that to the Game 1 thread that currently has 18 pages and went to page 10 the same day it was posted. This is the main point of my post. I think everybody that usually frequents the general board will agree that if game 7 would have had horrible ratings as well, this thread would probably have even more posts than the game 1 thread by now. It's as if a solid amount of "Basketball fans and media" want the NBA to fail.
Related to the Apples and Oranges part, comparing finals ratings from 1988 to now as many people in this thread did and comparing Game 7 ratings during those seasons will always be Apples and Oranges. Same goes for average ratings.
- This was the 7th time since 1988 that a game 7 happened in a Finals series. That´s 7 out of 38 finals, or 18% of all finals in that period.
- As mentioned in another post, every other final included at least one Top 20 All Time Player that already had that type of recognition at this point, in all cases but one at least one of the biggest or most prestige markets like the Lakers, Boston, or the Knicks and in all cases but one at least one of the most famous players that even most non-basketball fans know (Lebron, Steph, Magic, Kareem, Kobe, Shaq).
- The second least prestige 7 game series happened in 2005 between San Antonio and Detroit. This still included Tim Duncan, both teams had already won titles and were constant contenders and Detroit was the defending Champion. Still, game 7 averaged "only" 19 Million viewers, so just 14.3% more than this year's series and this at a time where streaming and Internet wasn't really a thing yet.
- The 1994 finals averaged 16.9 Million in game 7, so only 0.98% more. Despite the fact that it involved 2 big markets in Houston and New York, it being the first time for both teams in at least a decade to make the finals, it being the first season where it was clear that a non-Jordan team will win the title, it being the first time since the early 80s that the potentially 2 best Centers in the league were facing each other in a finals series, the NBA being culturally super relevant and at a time where most people didn't even have a computer a home. Actually game 1 had a higher rating than game 7.
- As mentioned in the last 2 points as well, 4 of those 7 series happened at a time where Internet, Streaming and Smartphones either weren't a thing at all, or at least not mainstream yet. Namely 1988, 1994, 2005 and 2010. That the mindset was completely different in 88 and 05 is obvious. You were scheduling your time around games and events. There was no streaming, Netflix, Youtube, Online gaming and all the other online media options that Basketball is now competing against. In 2013 this was still relatively niche and slowly starting to get traction. I would say that even in 2016 it was definitely not as mainstream as it is today. So people are comparing numbers from decades where people lived a competely different life. It's similar to me saying "It's obvious that the music industry is struggling, since bands are selling way less CDs than they did in 2000."
- Related to your average coverage calculation. I have no idea about US television, but what I can clearly point out is that there was a switch from NBC to ABC in 2003 and NBC mostly had insane numbers. Might generally be related again to not having much to compete against, but can also of course be related to bigger broadcast availability. To also point out, it was not that uncommon until the 2000s that game 1 did better numbers than the last games of the series, happened also in game 7 of 88 and 94. This includes also 4 of 6 Jordan finals.
