JohnnyNightrain wrote:cochiseuofm wrote:I don't know if I agree with this. I have a lot of friends who are on the fence about liking and watching the NBA and my feeling from them is they lost general interest when Durant signed with GS.
That is purely anecdotal. It would be absurd to think that the quantitative data will say otherwise at the end of the season. The exact same thing happened this year. The debate wasn't about whether the Warriors would beat Cleveland, it was about are they the best team of all-time, better than the 72-win Bulls. To illustrate my point... this year's finals were the most-watched since the Jordan days and, of course, the ratings were high during the Heat's "big three" run. People absolutely love watching seemingly unbeatable teams.
Agreed. I think there's a misconception among many sports fans that more parity = more interest. When it reality, the years that feature the most open playing fields like 2006 Heat vs. Mavericks finals or the 2007 Cavs vs. Spurs finals usually generate the lowest ratings and the lowest amount of interest. Same thing goes for other sports as well. I've heard so many baseball fans say that the Royals vs Mets WS matchup of underdogs was such a beautiful thing for the game last year, yet it generated horrible ratings and very few outside of fans of the teams involved or hardcore baseball fans cared about it.
