By Paul Snyder
December 18, 2024
Gentle reader, please take a seat and halt operation of any heavy machinery. Engage in a little yoga breathing, count to ten, and do whatever else you need to regain your composure. Okay. Here it is. National Basketball Association television ratings are down.
It doesn’t mean the sport-viewing community and the basketball world love each other any less. It doesn’t mean basketball isn’t a great sport. And it’s not your fault! It just means some changes need to be made. But don’t worry. League commissioner Adam Silver, his hermetically sealed vault of MBA-credentialed growth and optimization wizards, dozens of executive VPs, professional consultants, and many others who live and die by shareholder value are on the case.
After days weeks months years of ordering in from Carbone, thumbing through slide decks, and staring at a white board with the word “SYNERGY” scrawled across it, these dangerous minds have yet to crack the code. In some ways – even from a track fan’s perspective – that’s deeply disheartening. With access to an unlimited money spigot, no shortage of middle-aged white guys with slicked back hairdos, and a product that, even at its dullest, produces zany and clip-ready highlights, the NBA can’t seem to crank the ratings-meter back to where it was during the halcyon days of the 1990s. If they can’t crack the code, what’s a scrappy underdog like track and field supposed to do?
For starters: we can internalize what hasn’t worked for the NBA and aim to avoid those same missteps. Sure, it’s its own $11 billion industry, but at the end of the day, pro basketball is really just a giant incubator for our far-more-important sport. So let’s dive into the seven problems the modern NBA faces that have direct track and field analogs.
They believe that more talent leads to a more exciting product.
One of the most tedious joys of being a basketball fan is that a large subset of said fandom insists – wrongly, but loudly – that basketball players were simply better 30 years ago. Were they more physical? Yes. Were there stars who would have been equally if not more successful if transposed into the modern league at their primes? Absolutely! But talent goes roster-deep: a bench player in the modern NBA, who’s probably 6’9”, can passably shoot the three, and has spent years reaping the physical benefits of modern exercise science – would likely receive significant minutes on any 1996 NBA squad.
The NBA now pulls athletes from the entire globe, so it’s not just the top players in America (with a smattering of Europeans) rounding out NBA rosters but the actual best players from each of the inhabitable continents. They are all massive. They can all shoot the lights out. Scoring is way, way up! The pace of play is a blur compared to two decades ago! In short, the league has plenty of Jakob Ingebrigtsens and Faith Kipyegons capable of rewriting record books in a Wavelight-assisted supershoe time trial.
More scoring means more fun, right? If we can just get to a place where every team sinks 18 threes a night, our little “ratings oopsie” will be a thing of the past! Just like how faster times and farther tosses and longer/higher jumps mean more interesting events, right?! Or maybe it just lowers tension and deadens our sensitivity to true greatness…
There’s been a flattening of strategies and styles.
The latest sports statistics all suggest that if you load up your roster with decent-to-good three-point shooters, your total points will be maximized if you just start indiscriminately launching from deep. So, of course, all 30 NBA teams run the exact same offense scheme, and every random Wednesday night game turns into a repetitive slugfest between interchangeable teams, one of which may be located near where you live.
In sports, it’s not enough for the outcome to be unexpected. How that outcome is reached matters just as much, if not more. Fans crave unpredictability – moments of tension and uncertainty, opportunities to gasp and nudge the person sitting next to them. It’s ultimately more fun to see Christian Coleman’s start matched against Noah Lyles’s finish than to watch nine identical race patterns play out side-by-side.
Kevin Morris / @KevMoFoto
It’s hard to institutionally force competitors to change how they compete, even via rule changes. But one tried-and-true method is to physically alter the arena of play or criteria for success. This is hard for an entity like the NBA to pull off – do you let each home team draw its own court boundaries and set its own quarter lengths?
But for track, it’s simple: skip the rabbits or pacing lights and push for more interesting race formats. Racing at Franklin Field is actually pretty different than at Hayward Field, and that’s not even getting into street meets, cross-country, off distances, or many other options available and waiting for us to leverage.
They’re changing rules just to do it.
Innovation. IN. OH. VAY. SHUN. A buzzword so common it’s essentially lost all meaning. But it still sounds cool in a pitch meeting! Innovation can mean tinkering with a beloved product just so, to bring out the very best in it. But it can also mean letting a bull run through a china shop – you’re guaranteed a dramatically different outcome, but not necessarily a better one.
First, you change the in-game rules. “Innovations” like the Coaches’ Challenge, which allows NBA coaches to officially call into question the veracity of a call made by the refs. The refs huddle around a little television and stop the action dead to view a few key frames of footage from every conceivable angle to see if they got the whistle right. And we, the fans, are bored to tears because the flow of the game is totally ruined. Plus we’re deprived of something every sports-lover secretly craves: the ability to grumble about a botched call.
This is a problem the track and field community knows well. World Athletics’s own MBA brain trust thinks we can save the sport by turning long jump boards into takeoff zones, reducing field event series to a sixth-round do-or-die, and measuring pole vault attempts with lasers. Innovation without improvement is just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic – either way, the ship is still sinking.
At the end of the day, there’s simply too much basketball.
Every NBA team plays 80+ regular season games. That’s after the five-ish preseason games they’re forced to suit up for. And if they’re lucky, a team will play some playoff games, too: at minimum four, at maximum 28. Plus, some guys have to slap on a fake grin and sleepwalk through the All-Star Game. It’s just too much.
Players’ enormous bodies break down over the course of this grueling season, so they get hurt or rest or just play a checked-out style of basketball: the ol’ “scheduled loss.” A lot of these guys don’t care most nights of the year. (It is a job after all. Are you giving it 110% for every email you send or brick you stack? If you’re a heart surgeon, hopefully the answer is yes, but the rest of us are just trying to get through the week.) Every once in a while, you catch a game where everyone is locked in and you’re reminded of just how beautiful and captivating this game can be. But if those games only come in May and June, what’s the point of January?
On this front, we’re only doing slightly better. There is an awful lot of track and field out there. It’s just that nearly all of it is akin to the preseason. We don’t have enough “good track.” But we’ve at least identified the problem and Michael Johnson is throwing money at it.
Even if you want to watch all that basketball, they don’t make it easy.
We’re lousy with basketball. We’re drowning in it. And the NBA presumably wants for people to watch all of it, Clockwork Orange-style, eyeballs forced open, so they can charge other companies a lot of money to sell us beer and insurance.
But they don’t make it easy. Do you have cable? Do you have your grandparents’ login info? If you do, that helps. But in this day and age, paying for cable is not enough. One must subscribe to a smorgasbord of buggy streaming apps and platforms to become the best basketball viewer one can be.
Oh, that’s right dear reader. You know this particular paragraph by heart. For a while, it seemed like we were starting to solve this problem, as more and more track and field content found its way onto Peacock, YouTube, or both. And then the Diamond League let the highest bidder stick its premium product behind a paywall, so we’re back to square one in 2025.
And star quality can’t be taught or bought.
It’s often said the NBA is a superstar-driven league. But what makes an athlete capable of transcending their domain of greatness to become a can’t-miss, cross-cultural icon?
Is it enough to be absolutely dominant at what you do? No. The best basketball player at the moment is Nicola Jokic, a man who looks like he’s about to cry during every media appearance because he is tired… tired of playing basketball… and he dearly misses his horses back home in Serbia. Is it enough to be hot? Again, nope. NBA League Pass subscribers have been peppered with SKIMS ads featuring oiled and shirtless MVP candidate Shai Gilgeous-Alexander for years now, and he’s yet to become a household name outside of households that subscribe to NBA League Pass. Is it enough to be devastatingly charismatic? Some good old fashioned charm goes farther than other qualities, but you need to earn your spot on the world’s radar before it can become disarming.
There are the lucky few who truly transcend, but in recent history that list isn’t much longer than LeBron James and Usain Bolt. And here, track and field is once again ahead of basketball: we’ve already had to grapple with trying to channel love for an individual into enthusiasm for a sport after a generation-shifting retirement, albeit with mixed results. NBC has spent a lot of time and money selling us Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone and Noah Lyles as The Next Big Thing, and while they’re among the small group of athletes whose names at least ring a bell with your uncle’s sister’s roommate’s barber, they’re not on Usain’s level yet.
It’s here that track and field is very both blessed and cursed to exist within the shadow of the Olympics. The Games themselves are the superstar. Every four years millions of fans willingly turn on their televisions to learn a whole new slate of names and develop passionate feelings about their favorite Paris 2024 figureheads… only to forget them entirely by September.
What we really need to improve is our storytelling.
Narratives, narratives, narratives. Narratives are everywhere. Narratives shape how we perceive colors, they impact how we taste food, and they inform how we feel about the current state of the National Basketball Association. Within the NBA, the narratives aren’t good. A lot of these are organic in nature. The public has grown tired of the same old BS, and there’s only so many times someone can be subjected to footage of Luka Doncic flailing around then flopping to the floor to pick up a couple foul shots before changing the channel.
But a lot of narratives are inorganic. The 24/7 news cycle needs to talk about something, and you can get paid a lot of money to scream “basketball is broken” in a corner of a SportsCenter splits screen every day for years. Many prominent members of basketball’s commentariat seem to hate basketball and anyone who plays it.
The proliferation of well-poisoning opinions like these is an unforced error. There’s a fine line between being constructively critical of a sport you love and mud-slinging for attention. Here in our little corner of the Internet, we believe there’s no point in condemning a problem without offering a solution, which is why we try to pair every TLC complaint with a free idea for a fix (Maybe we should start charging USATF to read the second half of every newsletter?)
So here’s our olive branch to the WA NBA bigwigs: take a beat, think about what made you love track and field basketball in the first place, and how you can get more people to pay attention to that stuff. How do relationships between teammates evolve? Where does improvement come from? How does a lesson from a regular-season loss lead to a postseason win? There are stories out there worth telling that, by their very nature, require investment from fans to follow from start to finish, and you folks have a really big and popular platform to share them.
Paul Snyder
Meme-disparager, avid jogger, MS Paint artist, friend of Scott Olberding, Citius Mag staff writer based in Flagstaff. Supplying baseless opinions, lukewarm takes, and vaguely running-related content. Once witnessed televison's Michael Rapaport cut a line of 30 people to get a slice of pizza at John's on Bleeker at 4am. You can follow Paul on Twitter at @DanielDingus.
