📉 A League In Crisis

At the beginning of the NBA playoffs, I made my official predictions. Which, as one TikTok commenter astutely pointed out, “aged like milk.”

Now, it’s one thing to have a strong bias for your favorite team (who is also the number one seed), and pick them to win a few rounds…

But it’s a different thing entirely to only make just one correct pick past the first round.

What can I say, I’m built different. 🤷‍♂️

🗞 The Big Story

When people talk about “media bias” I don’t think they’re referring to this chart by some Redditor that outlines the coverage LeBron James got on Bleacher Report’s Instagram from 2019-2020 as compared to every other team and player.

But today, I am.

You see, if these NBA playoffs have taught me anything it’s two things:

1. Don’t ever talk about your personal relationship with failure 

2. NBA fans are completely insufferable

But let’s focus in on the latter because as you might have also seen on Twitter over the past few weeks no one seems to hate the NBA more than NBA fans.

But if you gauge how this year’s NBA playoffs are going based solely on NBA Twitter, you might assume that the league is crumbling and these are the worst playoffs in over a century - but actually the exact opposite is true.

Conference Finals ratings are actually up in both the East and the West, with Game 2 of the Western Conference Finals between the Nuggets and the Lakers being the most-watched conference final game since Game 2 of the Blazers and Warriors in 2019.

In fact, this year’s NBA playoffs are actually on pace to average the most games with at least seven million viewers since 2018.

So why are the NBA’s biggest fans still complaining?

Well, I think you have to start pointing fingers at sites like Bleacher Report, and how they’re framing these playoffs.

Because as you scroll through their coverage of a Laker’s Game 3 loss to the Nuggets to go down 3-0 you notice one thing:

It isn’t centered around the winning team, it’s centered around the team with potentially the better story.

Which begs the question: Do die-hard basketball fans actually care about the game or the narratives around the game?

Now, there’s no denying that the NBA is a narrative-driven league, the drama around player movement and rivalries is almost Shakespearean, but sometimes it seems like these narratives that media outlets like Bleacher Report build up become more important than the game itself.

And look, I get that there are more storylines to post about if the Lakers played the Celtics versus the Nuggets playing the Heat, but it seems like the NBA media and fans get more enjoyment out of imagining what basketball could be like rather than just appreciating the game as it’s happening in front of them.

But Why Does This Matter?

It doesn’t really, it’s just annoying. It’s like Bleacher Report will make a graphic about LeBron reaching an 11th Finals and fans get mad that it didn’t happen because it “would have been a cooler story".”

The beauty of sport is the randomness, the parity, and the chaos. Not the picture-perfect storybook endings media outlets are pushing for the sake of clicks.

But also, let’s be real… making Melo’s retirement about LeBron is just corny.

If you’re coming from TikTok, this was the reference… 😅

🏈 XF-’L’

What do you get when you take the most valuable sports league in America and recreate it with less talented players?

You get a less valuable sports league.

And the Rock is finding this out firsthand as the viewership numbers from the XFL’s first season just came back and they are underwhelming at best:

• 1.43 million viewers for the championship game

  • Down from 1.6 million viewers during the league’s opening game

• Averaged 600,000 viewers across the 10-week regular season

And these numbers actually lag behind their main spring football competitor, the USFL, which is owned by Fox and last year saw:

• 1.5 million viewers tune into their championship game

• An average of 700,000 people tune in during the regular season.

The USFL is also reportedly outearning the XFL in ad revenue by a factor of 2:1.

Now, both the USFL and the XFL have $150M financial commitments from Fox and ABC respectively - but will it be enough to keep either afloat?

My prediction is: not unless the NFL wants them to stick around.

I explained this more in the Sportonomics episode we released yesterday, but I think the only way the XFL or the USFL exist in five years is if the NFL has made the conscious decision to vertically integrate down into a form of minor-league football.

Otherwise, these two spring leagues exist between competing with the NFL and remaining as an unaffiliated, unsustainable developmental league.

Neither scenario has a good outcome.

New episodes of Sportonomics release every Thursday on Spotify and Apple Podcasts!

⏪ The Prettiest, Ugliest Baseball Stadium

Patterson, New Jersey just reopened historic Hinchliffe Stadium - one of two remaining Negro League stadiums still hosting baseball today.

The restoration project took 2.5 years and $103M to complete after the stadium sat abandoned for 26 years.

Now don’t get me wrong, I appreciate the history and waterfall vistas this stadium provides, but it’s not a baseball stadium.

That hasn’t stopped the city’s mayor and former MLB Player and analyst Harold Reynolds from lobbying MLB to play a “Field of Dreams”-style game here.

📺 Wrexham AFC Just BROKE Football...

Watch the full YouTube video here.

👋 Remember, it’s a three-day weekend and the US Military lied about Pat Tillman’s death. Happy Friday!