2023-06-09 13:44:00
While many predicted a low audience for the 2023 NBA Finals, the final series between Denver and Miami draws almost as many viewership as last year’s record attendance between the Warriors and the Celtics. Who said these Finals wouldn’t be exciting?
Yes, we can sometimes tend to forget it when we go into raptures over highlights but the NBA remains above all a business. The influx of its viewers is therefore an essential element in the financial health of the league. With the Nuggets crossing the door to the Western Conference Finals for the first time in their history, and Miami finishing 8th in the East in the regular season, there was reason to predict that the audiences were approaching lower standards.
Taking Denver-dominated Game 3 as an example, viewership peaked at 12.39 million viewers on ABC: a drop of only 3% compared to the historical audience of last year. You should know that no match in the Finals this year exceeded this drop of 3%. Now if we rewind to examine the interest of Game 3 of the Finals over the last few years, we unsurprisingly find the October 2020 Finals in last place due to COVID: 6.08 million viewers. And if we disregard the health crisis, we have to go back to 2007 to have the lowest audience since the 2000s with 9.49 million viewers.
In short, a lot of figures to remember what in the end? That the NBA is booming, despite the lack of hype that could be felt at the start of the series. Admittedly, there is no Lebron James or Stephen Curry on the court, but two teams which, despite the fact that they are not looking for the light, remain big names in terms of spectacle and level of play. These Finals NBA are also an opening door to the writing of new stories, to the discovery of new players who did not shine so much before reaching this stage of the competition. Nikola Jokic is a good example: the fact that he plays for the Denver Nuggets has not helped the popularization of his spectacular game for the general public. And when we see the figures concerning the highlights of Jokic over the last 30 days, we can only verify this phenomenon:
Last season, Nikola Jokić was ranked 18 among all players in video views on NBA social media platforms.
This regular season, he rose to no. 9.
Over the last 30 days, he leads the league in social media video views with 316 million. pic.twitter.com/h4SRHUEpd1
— NBA Communications (@NBAPR) June 6, 2023
Either the NBA gained a crazy influx last year to the point of compensating for the supposed lack of interest in this series, or this Denver-Miami is indeed an attractive series that brings people back in front of their TV. In any case, when we see the level of play offered by the two teams, we can only think that these Finals are indeed a gift for NBA consumers, and the figures confirm it!
Source : NBA Press Relations
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