NBA fans exist

It's true.

Good morning. Let’s basketball.

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The Blue Riders; Wassily Kandinsky; 1903

The NBA’s Christmas Day ratings hit a five-year high.

(This section is about that, so skip it if you are already bored. There’s a lot of reaction to Thursday’s thrilling and confounding action below.)

The biggest wins: a big number in the early game (praise be to Wembanyama) and huge jumps in the evening games, which this season didn’t have to face a massive NFL game. Lakers vs. Warriors had the highest Christmas ratings since the Lakers vs. Clippers showdown in 2019. (Notably, it had no NFL competition.) Nuggets vs. Suns and Sixers vs. Celtics did big numbers, too.

The anti-NBA ratings truthers are complaining that the numbers are inflated due to Disney showing the games on ABC as well as ESPN (what scoundrels, using the networks at their disposal to expand the audience for one of their most expensive properties, and then accurately reporting how many people watched it!) and the NFL’s decision to play only two games on Netflix (a very traditional football platform) on a Wednesday (a very traditional football day).

But uh, that stuff happened and more people than usual watched basketball on Christmas. Facts are facts. Don’t know what to tell ya. Maybe the league that just inked a $76 billion media rights deal isn’t dead yet.

The NFL is the dominant sports property in the United States. That’s perfectly clear. When it goes head-to-head with the NBA or any other sport, it wins and the other league loses audience. No one questions that. But it doesn’t mean the other leagues are dying, or worthless, or irrelevant.

The NBA games were real good. The marketing (including the Jingle Bells Revisited ad that was playing constantly; I’ve been walking around the house saying “tune it up, KD” for a couple weeks) was solid. I have witnessed Minnie Mouse win a halftime dunk contest. Now bring back Christmas jerseys and we’re really in business.

As I wrote Thursday, parity is a big factor here. People want to watch competitive games. I suspect folks stuck with the competitive games when flipping around, or put it on and didn’t change away from it because the games stayed close. People turn off blow-outs, even though blow-outs can become competitive games quicker than ever these days.

While we’re here: what an enormous “screw you” the NFL’s Netflix dalliance appears to be. The NFL has increasingly targeted Christmas Day due to the huge audiences when the league would naturally have games on the holiday. The NFL then leveraged those audiences into an exclusive deal with Netflix, which pays an estimated $70-80 million per game. That payment goes to NFL owners, and is backfilled by more streaming platform fees paid by fans to another corporation. The league saw fans making time for their product on a holiday and decided to find brand new ways to milk that cow to the express financial detriment of those fans.

It’s business, sure. But you would think the outsider sports media critic ecosystem would spend a wee bit of time talking about how gross some business that is. Who is it that you all write for?

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Luka Don-sheeeeeeeeeeeit