The day before, pre kickoff of the season’s first NFL game, fans had booed “racial unity,” at Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City. Were the loutish fans moral monsters or were they just tired of being lectured like they were?
I agree that it seems like a lot of media types seem content to cover their ears and pretend any dissent from the “sports MUST be a social justice platform” take is a racist Trump supporter opinion only. For the 2020 Return Of Sports especially, a lot of people just wanted to tune all the bad shit out and be entertained. If you were an even moderately online, engaged person, you couldn’t escape talk of either COVID deaths or police killings and racism and protests. My guess is if you asked the average sports fan, they’d say that athletes can use their personal social media platforms for discussions about whatever topics they want, but the actual game should just be a game. Maybe that’s too much “shut up and dribble” but then again if I decided I wanted to spend my time at work promoting social justice causes rather than focusing on my job, I’d probably be fired. Either way, people wanted sports to come back as an escape from all the troubling, difficult things happening in the real world. Not so that athletes, many of whom have had scandals of their own from immoral behavior, can act as moral guides on hot button issues.
But the larger decline really seems way more indicative of a product that doesn’t really care about its fans or about most franchises. The majority of sports fans aren’t actually fans of the sport in the purest sense, they’re fans of a team. It’s why people hate on dominant players, at least when they’re not on their team. Most people don’t think, when watching Tom Brady, “wow, what an honor it is to watch possibly the most dominant quarterback of all time.” They think, fuck that guy, he sucks, he’s overrated, unless they’re a Patriots or Buccaneers fan. Why should Pelicans fans be that excited about getting a talent like Zion Williamson when you know he’s going to leave as soon as he can? At least Kawhi helped bring a title to Toronto before he left, but I can’t imagine it felt good to see your star player leave immediately after winning because he wanted to live in LA instead. And then you have LeBron complaining about play in tournaments, and you wonder why anyone should actually care. That seems to be way more of the problem with the NBA, why should anyone care about them or their teams unless they’re one of the few that have assembled an all-star team to compete against the other two or three all-star teams while everyone else typically has no shot.
To add to this, the monetary value of the NBA and the reality of viewership/fandom seems totally divorced. I remember in the 2000s every team had "their" guy - can you ever imagine Gilbert Arenas moving from the Wizards or Baron Davis leaving the Warriors other than exhausting their stay? Instead, due to the fact that nobody, not even the players, seems to care about the regular season, and due to the fact that a team's strength revolves around star power, players seem to just want to play with their friends to pass the time during the regular season and have enough negotiating power to do so. I don't see how a team like OKC ever competes other than hitting the absolute jackpot on all their draft picks and having a star player swansong carry them to the Finals in a relatively easy year, like Phoenix did this year. Why would you be a fan of 90% of the teams in the NBA? The same thing is happening in soccer, as well, though the money doesn't come from TV deals but rather oil states.
This is a thing my friend and I often talk about. How, A: the media likes to assume what black people think and B: the more we suppress opinions we don't like the more dangerous they become. I don't know how you address the balance between free speech and people saying crazy s**t, but ostracising everyone who doesn't have the prescribed opinion is definitely not the way.
I think those who are knee deep in academic theories on gender, race, equality etc, need to realise not everyone is reading Foucault, De Beauvior or Bell Hooks for fun. You can't expect people to wake up one morning and be as woke as you and delete them from public life for questioning concepts they don't even understand (let alone agree with).
How we solve this? No clue. I do think in the real world, away from twitter and advertising, most people don't care. Not out of hate or ignorance, but are too busy trying to pay bills to care about what some enraged twitter people have to say about things that don't really effect how they keep their families alive.
We also castigate those who just want sports to be sports, but everything is so politicised, some people just want to watch sports and hear people talk about sports stuff. I don't need some corporation vomiting empty CSR in my face.
I heartily agree with many of your points, especially when it comes to the fact that most people don't care. However, and I know how awful this sounds, I want to argue that suppressing bad opinions might have some value. I don't deny that it runs a dangerous game, but I think that shifting the Overton window of what people feel comfortable saying can make material change in the laws of this country. Case in point, LGBT rights. Gay marriage (which I personally consider an issue of equal rights) was such a contentious topic that Prop 8 passed in California within the past 15 years . But pressure from cultural institutions and individuals alike made being homophobic inappropriate online and in media. And then there is a tidal wave of public opinion that in some ways resulted in the Supreme Court decision. Obviously that is an oversimplification, but I doubt we would have seen SCOTUS make gay marriage legal without the climate that existed in 2015.
Maybe I'm naive, but I feel like when it comes to something like that, I would rather that it be forced into law by public opinion, even if that public opinion is made up of tons of people suppressing their personal beliefs, because I think it is more important to have equality and protection than allow for ignorance to be espoused without shame. I think there are kinds of opinions where it is completely valid to dissent and where we should not seek majority rule, but human rights isn't one of them.
I don't think it sounds awful. You make a great point about the positive impact it can have. But there is something about the tone in how things are being done now that just doesn't feel right or healthy in the long run. I fear the more the stakes are raised against dissenting opinions (not necessarily on human rights etc) and the less we try and understand why people think the way they do, the more we incubate something far more insidious and dangerous.
This was the best "Sports" article I have read in years! It is too bad it didn't reach the broad audience at the athletic though. If this was submitted and rejected by the A then I would understand your decision. Was it?
Sidestepping the last question...there's a chance I can reach a broad audience right here. I was pleasantly shocked at how many reads the Nike article got, for instance.
Some interesting ideas here, but unfortunately, Ethan does what many of us nowadays do: he seizes on one result that confirms his own opinion. One study done confirms his take that people don’t like it when athletes kneel, but *many* other studies show they don’t mind it and in fact, support it. Any good scientist goes with the *preponderance* of data; not the one outlier.
Ditto for his takes on NBA viewership decline. Notice that Ethan is always comparing viewership back to 2012 (he mentions “9 years ago here”, and in his other previous articles about it, he always refers back to 2012). Well 2012 was back at the peak of the LeBron/Miami Heat days - glitz not seen since Kobe/Shaq on the Lakers in 2000 - and was an outlier in terms of NBA viewership. The ratings were at a VERY unusually high point in 2012. If you compare today’s ratings to those back *before* 2012, there is not such a precipitous drop. In fact, the ratings nowadays are similar to the ratings in the mid 2000’s.
There could be many reasons why NBA ratings have dropped over the past 9 years. The most obvious one is that 2012 was an all time high so if you compare anything to an all time high, it will look worse. Or another reason: for many of these last nine years, the teams in major media markets such as the Knicks and the Bulls have sucked. Or another possible reason: the preponderance of foreign born players in the league. Fewer local boys or familiar faces from college hoops to root for could be driving down ratings. Another possible reason: players shifting teams so much more nowadays reduces fan loyalty to their teams. Or another reason: the preponderance of super teams means most teams and their fans know before the season begins that they can’t win the championship. Or another possible reason is load management: since teams now know that playing back to back games or 4 games in 5 days leads to a much higher chance of injury, they often rest their stars. Or another possible reason is all the egregious foul baiting going on by the lines of Harden/Trae Young etc. *Everybody* hates that. The point is that there are *so many* possible reasons for viewership decline, that claiming viewership is down because of social consciousness/BLM issues is ignoring so many other possible reasons - and using one outlier study to support it seems tenuous at best.
Also notice how Ethan doesn’t mention the WNBA. The WNBA has been *much more* politically active and socially conscious than the NBA. Yet WNBA viewership is up quite a bit; in fact, the WNBA is one of the only sports where viewership and ratings increased over the past year and a half. If Ethan is correct in maintaining that social consciousness is driving down the ratings, why are the WNBA numbers increasing so much? The WNBA doesn’t have the same problems with players switching teams so much or creating super teams or with egregious flopping/foul baiting. Most of their players also played several years in college, making them more familiar to viewers. Maybe that’s why their ratings are up so much. But there is absolutely zero doubt that the WNBA put social issues at the forefront *much* more than the NBA and also had their viewership/ratings go up.
The WNBA ratings increasing is just one data point, so I won’t say it categorically proves Ethan wrong. And many of us turn to sports to escape the all the frustrations of real life and the protests bring that right back to our faces. So who’s really to know? But Ethan calling BLM *far left* to prove his point is completely inaccurate. BLM is simply saying that Black Lives Matter. Which isn’t a radical statement at all. Over 95% of the BLM protests were completely peaceful. The 5% which had violence often had the violence initiated by the police or right wing protestors. The fact that here in the USA, the BLM can be painted as “far left” says much more about the radical right of the US (and keep in mind that politically speaking, the USA is far right of the norm among advanced nations with free elections - in 2012 a comparison of the policies and language used put the USA Democratic Party just *right* of the political center of all advanced nations with free elections, while the Republican Party was the most extremist right *major* party in all advanced nations. In 2016, the USA Democratic Party was barely left of center while the Republicans were again the most extreme right wing major political party). Racism is unfortunately alive and well in the US. It’s no accident that the Tea Party rose to prominence after Obama became President, and that racist tropes were a mainstay of Trump’s campaign and governance.
I think, therefore, that another way to frame the “decrease in ratings” argument is that the rise of racism and radical shift to the extreme right by one of the two major political parties is causing them to not watch a sport that has very few white players (and you can count the number of white NBA players born in America with just your hands). If the rise of social consciousness in the NBA is causing a viewership decline, the blame definitely belongs more with the radical right refusing to watch rather than with - as Ethan suggests here - the “far left” (quotes to indicate it’s not really a far left position at all) adopting an extreme position and hitting the rest of us over the head with it.
But the main point here is that there are SO MANY possible reasons for a ratings decline from the all time high in 2012, that using one outlier study to advance your thesis while ignoring all the other possible reasons and also ignoring the most obvious counter-example of the WNBA ratings increase makes this a rather one-sided and shrill take by Ethan.
Yep, I made a mistake when I ascribed the, “BLM is far left” quote to Ethan. Rather it was in a quote from noted right wing tool Clay Travis. However, Ethan has been pushing this, “the NBA’s public socially conscious stance is a major reason for the ratings decline”, take for a year or two now. I maintain that Ethan is making a couple of factual mistakes when he does this.
1) He chooses to believe the results of one outlier poll from Macalester College about peoples’ true feelings about the kneeling protests rather than the majority of polls which come to a different conclusion about peoples’ true feelings on the subject. He also ignores all the *many many* other possible reasons (load management, player movement, all the foul baiting by Harden, Trae Young, etc.) for the ratings decline, including completely omitting the obvious counterpoint of the increase in the much more socially conscious WNBA’s ratings.
2) He is comparing today’s ratings to the unusually high ratings of 2012. He’s done that in all his ratings articles over the last year or two. It’s not fair to compare anything to the peak. Doing so distorts the reality. As I mentioned before, the ratings today are very similar to those in the mid 2000’s.
Any chance we can get an article on ESPN ending The Jump and possibly de-emphasizing the NBA as the core of their brand ahead of the next TV deal negotiations? I don't think they would actually let go of the NBA, but it could give some negotiating leverage. From the NBA side they have to be asking if ESPN is really the best partner going forward for them at some point. Who is even their primary On-Air NBA personality now?
This is a pretty good description of the media-fan divergence but I’m wondering if you have thoughts on how/why this came to be. I’m inclined to favor approaches like Christopher Lasch’s in Revolt of Elites or Martin Gurri’s Revolt of the Public to explain the phenomenon from both sides of it (both books very much fit the vein of thought you’ve been following on your first few pieces).
The missing piece of this all I’m curious about, and maybe you have something in the works: what about the player-media and player-fan divergences respectively? Many of the players come from backgrounds where I imagine it’s hard for them to latch on to the buzzword politics without preference falsification. Having been around an ideologically diverse group like the Warriors featuring the likes of Iggy, Dray, Steph, and Bogut surely you have gathered insights on this angle too (to a lesser extent the Cavs with characters like Kyrie)?
Might be good for another post on another day, but there is a BIG divergence between normative athlete takes and what is sold to the fan as the normative athlete take.
(Sorry if I missed this being part of the piece. Was reading on the phone.)
I wonder how much the age composition of sports fans vs the athletes matter in this. In 1990 around 31% of the population were 45+. In 2020 it's 42%. So even if we have always had the "Back in my day" types, there is probably more of them now than ever. Couple that with the fact that maybe some younger people did not follow sports as much because for them today there are just so many more options (video games, etc.) This might make the fan population skew older than before and the clashes with the athletes and to a certain extent the sports writers.
I am not really sure I buy all of the idea that sports writing and sports have moved too far to the left for the fans, but a lot of fans do not dare say so. I find that reading comments online leads me to think that a lot of the fans that disagree can actually say so and they do find their outlet for doing so. And other people can see it too, so no one is afraid that they are alone in their belief necessarily.
I'm with you, it's not just the proclivity for the media to be liberal that is hurting the NBA.
I think a large part of the NBA's decline in popularity is also due to the way players have dropped the pretence that they care about fanbases. We all know it is an illusion, but that is part of what we pay for. It's like the WWE just admitting the whole thing is fake; it takes away the fun.
I think the style of play has hurt it too. Steph and GSW were amazing to watch, but seeing a fast break stop at the three point line or seeing half court offence consist of watching people shoot terrible threes, does not make for an interesting product.
I think the media shitting on the regular season doesn't help, neither does all the tedious arm chair GMing. People like dunks, physicality, tough mid-range shots and awesome Iso plays. The analytics movement, spurred on by "smart-basketball twitter" has breed some of the fun out of the game (at least in the regular season) and people don't want to watch a bunch of rich dudes who don't care run up and down jacking up threes for 2 hrs, followed by a million time outs to end the game.
Couldn’t agree with this anymore. While there’s a segment of the audience turned off by the left-leaning politics, most of the audience has been lost due to the diminishment of the regular season, obsession with 3s and lack of rapport with modern stars. It doesn’t help matters that NBA media is basically a stenographer for players and their agents.
I watched the 2020 playoffs and found the social justice messaging incredibly cringey as well, but I watched mainly because I was desperate for sports during the dog days of the pandemic.
The screaming, pants-shitting rage of denial among so many media types that politics were turning people off of the NBA was amazing to behold.
And I'm glad you mentioned the Limbaugh-on-ESPN days. This whole era feels very much like a mirror of the Bush era. Only instead of fighting terrorists, it's about fighting white supremacists. And instead of Christian Family Values being pushed, it's Woke Social Justice. What a time.
Umm - the vast majority of terrorist acts in the USA are committed by far right white supremacists. Over 70%, in fact. So fighting white supremacists today IS ALSO fighting terrorism.
One unmentioned fact is that the very act of playing the national anthem at a fully domestic regular sporting is a ridiculous, nationalistic, US centric tradition. The mixing of domestic sports and politics can largely be traced back to the Conservative position of forced nationalism and the fetishisation of the military that happens at US sporting events.
I went to a Capitols game in NHL and three times they asked the crowd to stand to supporter one solider or other. Probably a drone pilot who had murdered people that day.
Ya, it's annoying. As an aside, I'm not a fan of the song and that was before I had to hear it over a thousand times at work. That said, I don't think it's the worst thing to have a little bonding moment of nationalism before games. Most people seem to like it. Not a fan of the flyover stuff though.
It does introduce politics though by default. Patriotism, deference to the symbols of the political entity, is a political position. One that is treated as an absolute one side is valid only issue in jsut the same way.
So any discussion on politics and lack of alternative viewpoints in sport should start with the default assumption of fidieltiy to a fundamentally flawed political entity. And how messed up it is to tie that to domestic sport.
Why is this fidelity expressed at fully domestic sporting events but not fully domestic business meetings or church services or televised news coverage? Why link sport to this idealised fidelity to the nation.
When only one country in the world plays the national anthem at fully domestic sporting events you have to ask why that is surely? Every non American believes its ridiculous.
Why not play the anthem before every business meeting or gym session or phone call. Or every hour on TV? Sport is being made political by the anthem not the protesting of the anthem.
But why make sport about patriotism? Why are you insisting on making sport about being an American? Why are you so insecure in your patriotism that you have to express it publicly at every fully domestic sporting event?
There are so many wonderful things about America but this forced patriotism makes discussion of its flaws impossible. American exceptionalism is the cause of Americas problems and the cult like celebration of the nation state is what is gradually killing this once great nation.
The poverty here, coexisting alongside such great wealth, breaks my heart. Why are you so proud of thus inequality you can't watch baseball or football without a forced public song about your political identity?
I wonder if the forces we observe in social media are also playing out in sports and sports media. Perhaps Steven A.'s agenda is more driven by his knowledge of what it takes to maximize his popularity and less so by his moral compass, his understanding of his audience's leanings, and other factors.
Youtube AI shows that a diet of progressively radicalized content captures an audience. Watch a video about the marginal health benefits of coffee; then chain-watch AI recommendations, and an hour later you might be learning that drinking coffee with horse poop will have you outlive your grandchildren. It's tempting to see similar "audience capture" games on Twitter, Facebook, etc.
To continue the analogy then, a content creator sensitive to their audience's response - e.g., Steven A. Smith, Clay Travis, etc. - may intuit/understand that incremental radicalization works. Since popularity is a priority objective, you'd expect to see the polarization of the sports hosts in the relevant dimensions, including political/social.
A path to escaping from this feedback loop then might be discovering patterns whose gravity exceeds that of incremental radicalization.
Perhaps an economics framing could help side-step zero-sum socio-political standoffs.
It seems possible that a brand (insert your favorite host, athlete, coach, or shoe company) can grow in strength while a sports league is in decline. If this is broadly happening in the NBA ecosystem, the league needs to find ways to better influence the incentives of its employees and partners.
I commented on your last piece essentially asking, "So what," and I appreciate you engaging directly with that question in this piece. So many criticisms I read rely far too much on assuming the reader just "gets" why wokism is bad, without doing any genuine thinking to explore why, and as a result I've become pretty numb to this kind of argument (just as I have with a lot of woke arguments about why X,Y, or Z are bad). The one thing I'd throw in here is that it's a fallacy to assume that the fans at Arrowhead are merely expressing a rational response to oppression, just as it's a fallacy for a lot of the "mainstream media" to assume that the woke legion on Twitter is merely expressing themselves in a rational response to oppression when they get mad about whatever the new milkshake duck of the day is. In both cases, people aren't actually having a rational negative response to what they're seeing -- they're actually just cosigning on to the opinions of cynics pushing an agenda, like Nike's admakers, or like Clay Travis. It's like in politics: the mainstream media is often elitist toward working-class conservative opinions. But anyone who actually spends a lot of time with working-class conservatives can tell you that in many (most?) cases, they don't form their negative opinion about the NYT, or WaPo from actually reading articles in those outlets -- they're just parroting the narratives they hear from their preferred media outlets, whether its someone like Travis, or QAnon, or whoever, who have their own cynical agendas. We have a real problem with assuming the worst in this country, on the right and the left, but it comes from inhaling too much gas from your own side more than anything else. As an example -- most of the conservative sports fans I know assume Colin Kaepernick hates America, because that's what Travis insists. It doesn't mean anything to them when Colin Kaepernick says, "I love America," in public. That's stupid.
Also: to be quite honest, the Afghanistan comparison is quite bad. That was not a situation of the masses suddenly realising that they all agree on something.
It was a different thing and shouldn’t be included here just because it’s recent.
I guess you could say they revealed their preference not to die. Working with the Americans was a good way not to die. When the Taliban comes to town and America no longer has your back the best way not to die is to let the Taliban win.
It was much more a matter of the strength of the army being overestimated. But the army was underfed, undertrained, based on make-believe numbers, etc.
And so the soldiers stopped fighting when they did not get any support from above. It was less so a matter of supporting the Taliban.
You really have to squint to make the comparison, and it is simply too far fetched.
I really appreciate your objective & common sense approach to this topic.
Prior to 2020, I was a hard core Warriors fan. I subscribed to League Pass and I've watched every Dubs game since 2015.
But then everything changed in 2020. I wasn't a political person before, never voted in my life, but the BLM riots completely changed me. I watched cities burned and business destroyed everywhere and thought the country has gone crazy. How can politicians and media justify this? It was so insane to me. Soon after I became a conservative (Traditional Conservative according to the Hidden Tribe), and voted for the first time in my life (Trump obviously).
So you can understand why I couldn't watch the NBA anymore. I wish I can enjoy sports without politics, but the constant BLM messages was just intolerable. I unsubscribed from League Pass and unsubscribed from the Athletics. Now that NBA has toned down its social justice rhetoric, I think I will try to watch again this fall.
Anyways, thanks again for your unbiased writing, it is very refreshing. I do have a suggestion. Since this is a new venture for you, I think you should write more fun/lighthearted articles at first (How Nike lost Curry is the perfect example), create a momentum, build up your subscription base, then slowly wade into the heavier/serious stuff like this piece and the Nike piece.
Again, Good luck and look forward to your future works!
How do these theories explain: (i) the next NBA TV deal is going to be massive, and the people negotiating it are motivated by purely economic factors and (ii) ratings for the Masters were also historically bad?
I'm confused by your example of your parents buying a house back in the day for 50k explaining why the next NBA TV deal (in the future) is going to be huge. I'd argue it's evidence that the NBA is very much not dying.
This is a very good article and I agree with much of what you wrote. I was wondering, do you think another reason for the NBA's decline might also involve the increasing prevalence of superteams? In 2020, once my Pelicans were obviously not going to advance from the bubble into the playoffs, I didn't watch a second of playoff basketball (for the first time in forever). My main reason was I had absolutely no interest in Lebron and the Lakers winning another title. I agree with you the messaging on jerseys was incredibly awkward, but my main beef was I'm sick of superstars colluding to play with each other in glamour markets and (small sample size, for sure) I have many friends who feel the same way.
A drop that big is a multi factor phenomenon, so ya, the superteam effect is likely part of what happened. My main contention with these articles is a) It's multi factor and b) some factors are less taboo to discuss than others
I agree that it seems like a lot of media types seem content to cover their ears and pretend any dissent from the “sports MUST be a social justice platform” take is a racist Trump supporter opinion only. For the 2020 Return Of Sports especially, a lot of people just wanted to tune all the bad shit out and be entertained. If you were an even moderately online, engaged person, you couldn’t escape talk of either COVID deaths or police killings and racism and protests. My guess is if you asked the average sports fan, they’d say that athletes can use their personal social media platforms for discussions about whatever topics they want, but the actual game should just be a game. Maybe that’s too much “shut up and dribble” but then again if I decided I wanted to spend my time at work promoting social justice causes rather than focusing on my job, I’d probably be fired. Either way, people wanted sports to come back as an escape from all the troubling, difficult things happening in the real world. Not so that athletes, many of whom have had scandals of their own from immoral behavior, can act as moral guides on hot button issues.
But the larger decline really seems way more indicative of a product that doesn’t really care about its fans or about most franchises. The majority of sports fans aren’t actually fans of the sport in the purest sense, they’re fans of a team. It’s why people hate on dominant players, at least when they’re not on their team. Most people don’t think, when watching Tom Brady, “wow, what an honor it is to watch possibly the most dominant quarterback of all time.” They think, fuck that guy, he sucks, he’s overrated, unless they’re a Patriots or Buccaneers fan. Why should Pelicans fans be that excited about getting a talent like Zion Williamson when you know he’s going to leave as soon as he can? At least Kawhi helped bring a title to Toronto before he left, but I can’t imagine it felt good to see your star player leave immediately after winning because he wanted to live in LA instead. And then you have LeBron complaining about play in tournaments, and you wonder why anyone should actually care. That seems to be way more of the problem with the NBA, why should anyone care about them or their teams unless they’re one of the few that have assembled an all-star team to compete against the other two or three all-star teams while everyone else typically has no shot.
To add to this, the monetary value of the NBA and the reality of viewership/fandom seems totally divorced. I remember in the 2000s every team had "their" guy - can you ever imagine Gilbert Arenas moving from the Wizards or Baron Davis leaving the Warriors other than exhausting their stay? Instead, due to the fact that nobody, not even the players, seems to care about the regular season, and due to the fact that a team's strength revolves around star power, players seem to just want to play with their friends to pass the time during the regular season and have enough negotiating power to do so. I don't see how a team like OKC ever competes other than hitting the absolute jackpot on all their draft picks and having a star player swansong carry them to the Finals in a relatively easy year, like Phoenix did this year. Why would you be a fan of 90% of the teams in the NBA? The same thing is happening in soccer, as well, though the money doesn't come from TV deals but rather oil states.
This is a thing my friend and I often talk about. How, A: the media likes to assume what black people think and B: the more we suppress opinions we don't like the more dangerous they become. I don't know how you address the balance between free speech and people saying crazy s**t, but ostracising everyone who doesn't have the prescribed opinion is definitely not the way.
I think those who are knee deep in academic theories on gender, race, equality etc, need to realise not everyone is reading Foucault, De Beauvior or Bell Hooks for fun. You can't expect people to wake up one morning and be as woke as you and delete them from public life for questioning concepts they don't even understand (let alone agree with).
How we solve this? No clue. I do think in the real world, away from twitter and advertising, most people don't care. Not out of hate or ignorance, but are too busy trying to pay bills to care about what some enraged twitter people have to say about things that don't really effect how they keep their families alive.
We also castigate those who just want sports to be sports, but everything is so politicised, some people just want to watch sports and hear people talk about sports stuff. I don't need some corporation vomiting empty CSR in my face.
I heartily agree with many of your points, especially when it comes to the fact that most people don't care. However, and I know how awful this sounds, I want to argue that suppressing bad opinions might have some value. I don't deny that it runs a dangerous game, but I think that shifting the Overton window of what people feel comfortable saying can make material change in the laws of this country. Case in point, LGBT rights. Gay marriage (which I personally consider an issue of equal rights) was such a contentious topic that Prop 8 passed in California within the past 15 years . But pressure from cultural institutions and individuals alike made being homophobic inappropriate online and in media. And then there is a tidal wave of public opinion that in some ways resulted in the Supreme Court decision. Obviously that is an oversimplification, but I doubt we would have seen SCOTUS make gay marriage legal without the climate that existed in 2015.
Maybe I'm naive, but I feel like when it comes to something like that, I would rather that it be forced into law by public opinion, even if that public opinion is made up of tons of people suppressing their personal beliefs, because I think it is more important to have equality and protection than allow for ignorance to be espoused without shame. I think there are kinds of opinions where it is completely valid to dissent and where we should not seek majority rule, but human rights isn't one of them.
I don't think it sounds awful. You make a great point about the positive impact it can have. But there is something about the tone in how things are being done now that just doesn't feel right or healthy in the long run. I fear the more the stakes are raised against dissenting opinions (not necessarily on human rights etc) and the less we try and understand why people think the way they do, the more we incubate something far more insidious and dangerous.
Wow. A nuanced, thoughtful inquiry. Excellent writing, Ethan. I like reading you in this format. Looking forward to more.
This was the best "Sports" article I have read in years! It is too bad it didn't reach the broad audience at the athletic though. If this was submitted and rejected by the A then I would understand your decision. Was it?
Sidestepping the last question...there's a chance I can reach a broad audience right here. I was pleasantly shocked at how many reads the Nike article got, for instance.
Some interesting ideas here, but unfortunately, Ethan does what many of us nowadays do: he seizes on one result that confirms his own opinion. One study done confirms his take that people don’t like it when athletes kneel, but *many* other studies show they don’t mind it and in fact, support it. Any good scientist goes with the *preponderance* of data; not the one outlier.
Ditto for his takes on NBA viewership decline. Notice that Ethan is always comparing viewership back to 2012 (he mentions “9 years ago here”, and in his other previous articles about it, he always refers back to 2012). Well 2012 was back at the peak of the LeBron/Miami Heat days - glitz not seen since Kobe/Shaq on the Lakers in 2000 - and was an outlier in terms of NBA viewership. The ratings were at a VERY unusually high point in 2012. If you compare today’s ratings to those back *before* 2012, there is not such a precipitous drop. In fact, the ratings nowadays are similar to the ratings in the mid 2000’s.
There could be many reasons why NBA ratings have dropped over the past 9 years. The most obvious one is that 2012 was an all time high so if you compare anything to an all time high, it will look worse. Or another reason: for many of these last nine years, the teams in major media markets such as the Knicks and the Bulls have sucked. Or another possible reason: the preponderance of foreign born players in the league. Fewer local boys or familiar faces from college hoops to root for could be driving down ratings. Another possible reason: players shifting teams so much more nowadays reduces fan loyalty to their teams. Or another reason: the preponderance of super teams means most teams and their fans know before the season begins that they can’t win the championship. Or another possible reason is load management: since teams now know that playing back to back games or 4 games in 5 days leads to a much higher chance of injury, they often rest their stars. Or another possible reason is all the egregious foul baiting going on by the lines of Harden/Trae Young etc. *Everybody* hates that. The point is that there are *so many* possible reasons for viewership decline, that claiming viewership is down because of social consciousness/BLM issues is ignoring so many other possible reasons - and using one outlier study to support it seems tenuous at best.
Also notice how Ethan doesn’t mention the WNBA. The WNBA has been *much more* politically active and socially conscious than the NBA. Yet WNBA viewership is up quite a bit; in fact, the WNBA is one of the only sports where viewership and ratings increased over the past year and a half. If Ethan is correct in maintaining that social consciousness is driving down the ratings, why are the WNBA numbers increasing so much? The WNBA doesn’t have the same problems with players switching teams so much or creating super teams or with egregious flopping/foul baiting. Most of their players also played several years in college, making them more familiar to viewers. Maybe that’s why their ratings are up so much. But there is absolutely zero doubt that the WNBA put social issues at the forefront *much* more than the NBA and also had their viewership/ratings go up.
The WNBA ratings increasing is just one data point, so I won’t say it categorically proves Ethan wrong. And many of us turn to sports to escape the all the frustrations of real life and the protests bring that right back to our faces. So who’s really to know? But Ethan calling BLM *far left* to prove his point is completely inaccurate. BLM is simply saying that Black Lives Matter. Which isn’t a radical statement at all. Over 95% of the BLM protests were completely peaceful. The 5% which had violence often had the violence initiated by the police or right wing protestors. The fact that here in the USA, the BLM can be painted as “far left” says much more about the radical right of the US (and keep in mind that politically speaking, the USA is far right of the norm among advanced nations with free elections - in 2012 a comparison of the policies and language used put the USA Democratic Party just *right* of the political center of all advanced nations with free elections, while the Republican Party was the most extremist right *major* party in all advanced nations. In 2016, the USA Democratic Party was barely left of center while the Republicans were again the most extreme right wing major political party). Racism is unfortunately alive and well in the US. It’s no accident that the Tea Party rose to prominence after Obama became President, and that racist tropes were a mainstay of Trump’s campaign and governance.
I think, therefore, that another way to frame the “decrease in ratings” argument is that the rise of racism and radical shift to the extreme right by one of the two major political parties is causing them to not watch a sport that has very few white players (and you can count the number of white NBA players born in America with just your hands). If the rise of social consciousness in the NBA is causing a viewership decline, the blame definitely belongs more with the radical right refusing to watch rather than with - as Ethan suggests here - the “far left” (quotes to indicate it’s not really a far left position at all) adopting an extreme position and hitting the rest of us over the head with it.
But the main point here is that there are SO MANY possible reasons for a ratings decline from the all time high in 2012, that using one outlier study to advance your thesis while ignoring all the other possible reasons and also ignoring the most obvious counter-example of the WNBA ratings increase makes this a rather one-sided and shrill take by Ethan.
Yep, I made a mistake when I ascribed the, “BLM is far left” quote to Ethan. Rather it was in a quote from noted right wing tool Clay Travis. However, Ethan has been pushing this, “the NBA’s public socially conscious stance is a major reason for the ratings decline”, take for a year or two now. I maintain that Ethan is making a couple of factual mistakes when he does this.
1) He chooses to believe the results of one outlier poll from Macalester College about peoples’ true feelings about the kneeling protests rather than the majority of polls which come to a different conclusion about peoples’ true feelings on the subject. He also ignores all the *many many* other possible reasons (load management, player movement, all the foul baiting by Harden, Trae Young, etc.) for the ratings decline, including completely omitting the obvious counterpoint of the increase in the much more socially conscious WNBA’s ratings.
2) He is comparing today’s ratings to the unusually high ratings of 2012. He’s done that in all his ratings articles over the last year or two. It’s not fair to compare anything to the peak. Doing so distorts the reality. As I mentioned before, the ratings today are very similar to those in the mid 2000’s.
Any chance we can get an article on ESPN ending The Jump and possibly de-emphasizing the NBA as the core of their brand ahead of the next TV deal negotiations? I don't think they would actually let go of the NBA, but it could give some negotiating leverage. From the NBA side they have to be asking if ESPN is really the best partner going forward for them at some point. Who is even their primary On-Air NBA personality now?
I just might be working on a Jump post...
Their used to be a fan account on Twitter (@NBATheJump) but that no longer exists.
This is a pretty good description of the media-fan divergence but I’m wondering if you have thoughts on how/why this came to be. I’m inclined to favor approaches like Christopher Lasch’s in Revolt of Elites or Martin Gurri’s Revolt of the Public to explain the phenomenon from both sides of it (both books very much fit the vein of thought you’ve been following on your first few pieces).
The missing piece of this all I’m curious about, and maybe you have something in the works: what about the player-media and player-fan divergences respectively? Many of the players come from backgrounds where I imagine it’s hard for them to latch on to the buzzword politics without preference falsification. Having been around an ideologically diverse group like the Warriors featuring the likes of Iggy, Dray, Steph, and Bogut surely you have gathered insights on this angle too (to a lesser extent the Cavs with characters like Kyrie)?
Might be good for another post on another day, but there is a BIG divergence between normative athlete takes and what is sold to the fan as the normative athlete take.
(Sorry if I missed this being part of the piece. Was reading on the phone.)
I wonder how much the age composition of sports fans vs the athletes matter in this. In 1990 around 31% of the population were 45+. In 2020 it's 42%. So even if we have always had the "Back in my day" types, there is probably more of them now than ever. Couple that with the fact that maybe some younger people did not follow sports as much because for them today there are just so many more options (video games, etc.) This might make the fan population skew older than before and the clashes with the athletes and to a certain extent the sports writers.
I am not really sure I buy all of the idea that sports writing and sports have moved too far to the left for the fans, but a lot of fans do not dare say so. I find that reading comments online leads me to think that a lot of the fans that disagree can actually say so and they do find their outlet for doing so. And other people can see it too, so no one is afraid that they are alone in their belief necessarily.
The age gap aspect is an interesting idea.
I'm with you, it's not just the proclivity for the media to be liberal that is hurting the NBA.
I think a large part of the NBA's decline in popularity is also due to the way players have dropped the pretence that they care about fanbases. We all know it is an illusion, but that is part of what we pay for. It's like the WWE just admitting the whole thing is fake; it takes away the fun.
I think the style of play has hurt it too. Steph and GSW were amazing to watch, but seeing a fast break stop at the three point line or seeing half court offence consist of watching people shoot terrible threes, does not make for an interesting product.
I think the media shitting on the regular season doesn't help, neither does all the tedious arm chair GMing. People like dunks, physicality, tough mid-range shots and awesome Iso plays. The analytics movement, spurred on by "smart-basketball twitter" has breed some of the fun out of the game (at least in the regular season) and people don't want to watch a bunch of rich dudes who don't care run up and down jacking up threes for 2 hrs, followed by a million time outs to end the game.
Couldn’t agree with this anymore. While there’s a segment of the audience turned off by the left-leaning politics, most of the audience has been lost due to the diminishment of the regular season, obsession with 3s and lack of rapport with modern stars. It doesn’t help matters that NBA media is basically a stenographer for players and their agents.
I watched the 2020 playoffs and found the social justice messaging incredibly cringey as well, but I watched mainly because I was desperate for sports during the dog days of the pandemic.
The screaming, pants-shitting rage of denial among so many media types that politics were turning people off of the NBA was amazing to behold.
And I'm glad you mentioned the Limbaugh-on-ESPN days. This whole era feels very much like a mirror of the Bush era. Only instead of fighting terrorists, it's about fighting white supremacists. And instead of Christian Family Values being pushed, it's Woke Social Justice. What a time.
It really does feel like it's come full circle.
Umm - the vast majority of terrorist acts in the USA are committed by far right white supremacists. Over 70%, in fact. So fighting white supremacists today IS ALSO fighting terrorism.
One unmentioned fact is that the very act of playing the national anthem at a fully domestic regular sporting is a ridiculous, nationalistic, US centric tradition. The mixing of domestic sports and politics can largely be traced back to the Conservative position of forced nationalism and the fetishisation of the military that happens at US sporting events.
I went to a Capitols game in NHL and three times they asked the crowd to stand to supporter one solider or other. Probably a drone pilot who had murdered people that day.
Ya, it's annoying. As an aside, I'm not a fan of the song and that was before I had to hear it over a thousand times at work. That said, I don't think it's the worst thing to have a little bonding moment of nationalism before games. Most people seem to like it. Not a fan of the flyover stuff though.
It does introduce politics though by default. Patriotism, deference to the symbols of the political entity, is a political position. One that is treated as an absolute one side is valid only issue in jsut the same way.
So any discussion on politics and lack of alternative viewpoints in sport should start with the default assumption of fidieltiy to a fundamentally flawed political entity. And how messed up it is to tie that to domestic sport.
Why is this fidelity expressed at fully domestic sporting events but not fully domestic business meetings or church services or televised news coverage? Why link sport to this idealised fidelity to the nation.
When only one country in the world plays the national anthem at fully domestic sporting events you have to ask why that is surely? Every non American believes its ridiculous.
Why not play the anthem before every business meeting or gym session or phone call. Or every hour on TV? Sport is being made political by the anthem not the protesting of the anthem.
But why make sport about patriotism? Why are you insisting on making sport about being an American? Why are you so insecure in your patriotism that you have to express it publicly at every fully domestic sporting event?
There are so many wonderful things about America but this forced patriotism makes discussion of its flaws impossible. American exceptionalism is the cause of Americas problems and the cult like celebration of the nation state is what is gradually killing this once great nation.
The poverty here, coexisting alongside such great wealth, breaks my heart. Why are you so proud of thus inequality you can't watch baseball or football without a forced public song about your political identity?
Great read, thanks.
I wonder if the forces we observe in social media are also playing out in sports and sports media. Perhaps Steven A.'s agenda is more driven by his knowledge of what it takes to maximize his popularity and less so by his moral compass, his understanding of his audience's leanings, and other factors.
Youtube AI shows that a diet of progressively radicalized content captures an audience. Watch a video about the marginal health benefits of coffee; then chain-watch AI recommendations, and an hour later you might be learning that drinking coffee with horse poop will have you outlive your grandchildren. It's tempting to see similar "audience capture" games on Twitter, Facebook, etc.
To continue the analogy then, a content creator sensitive to their audience's response - e.g., Steven A. Smith, Clay Travis, etc. - may intuit/understand that incremental radicalization works. Since popularity is a priority objective, you'd expect to see the polarization of the sports hosts in the relevant dimensions, including political/social.
A path to escaping from this feedback loop then might be discovering patterns whose gravity exceeds that of incremental radicalization.
Perhaps an economics framing could help side-step zero-sum socio-political standoffs.
It seems possible that a brand (insert your favorite host, athlete, coach, or shoe company) can grow in strength while a sports league is in decline. If this is broadly happening in the NBA ecosystem, the league needs to find ways to better influence the incentives of its employees and partners.
I commented on your last piece essentially asking, "So what," and I appreciate you engaging directly with that question in this piece. So many criticisms I read rely far too much on assuming the reader just "gets" why wokism is bad, without doing any genuine thinking to explore why, and as a result I've become pretty numb to this kind of argument (just as I have with a lot of woke arguments about why X,Y, or Z are bad). The one thing I'd throw in here is that it's a fallacy to assume that the fans at Arrowhead are merely expressing a rational response to oppression, just as it's a fallacy for a lot of the "mainstream media" to assume that the woke legion on Twitter is merely expressing themselves in a rational response to oppression when they get mad about whatever the new milkshake duck of the day is. In both cases, people aren't actually having a rational negative response to what they're seeing -- they're actually just cosigning on to the opinions of cynics pushing an agenda, like Nike's admakers, or like Clay Travis. It's like in politics: the mainstream media is often elitist toward working-class conservative opinions. But anyone who actually spends a lot of time with working-class conservatives can tell you that in many (most?) cases, they don't form their negative opinion about the NYT, or WaPo from actually reading articles in those outlets -- they're just parroting the narratives they hear from their preferred media outlets, whether its someone like Travis, or QAnon, or whoever, who have their own cynical agendas. We have a real problem with assuming the worst in this country, on the right and the left, but it comes from inhaling too much gas from your own side more than anything else. As an example -- most of the conservative sports fans I know assume Colin Kaepernick hates America, because that's what Travis insists. It doesn't mean anything to them when Colin Kaepernick says, "I love America," in public. That's stupid.
Also: to be quite honest, the Afghanistan comparison is quite bad. That was not a situation of the masses suddenly realising that they all agree on something.
It was a different thing and shouldn’t be included here just because it’s recent.
At least outside of Kabul, the Taliban can be very popular. They tend to govern more effectively too.
It looks like Afghans quickly decided fighting against the Taliban wasn’t worth it without US pressure.
I guess you could say they revealed their preference not to die. Working with the Americans was a good way not to die. When the Taliban comes to town and America no longer has your back the best way not to die is to let the Taliban win.
I'm not a regional expert, but I think there's a persuasive argument to be made that the Taliban support level was undercounted.
It was much more a matter of the strength of the army being overestimated. But the army was underfed, undertrained, based on make-believe numbers, etc.
And so the soldiers stopped fighting when they did not get any support from above. It was less so a matter of supporting the Taliban.
You really have to squint to make the comparison, and it is simply too far fetched.
I really appreciate your objective & common sense approach to this topic.
Prior to 2020, I was a hard core Warriors fan. I subscribed to League Pass and I've watched every Dubs game since 2015.
But then everything changed in 2020. I wasn't a political person before, never voted in my life, but the BLM riots completely changed me. I watched cities burned and business destroyed everywhere and thought the country has gone crazy. How can politicians and media justify this? It was so insane to me. Soon after I became a conservative (Traditional Conservative according to the Hidden Tribe), and voted for the first time in my life (Trump obviously).
So you can understand why I couldn't watch the NBA anymore. I wish I can enjoy sports without politics, but the constant BLM messages was just intolerable. I unsubscribed from League Pass and unsubscribed from the Athletics. Now that NBA has toned down its social justice rhetoric, I think I will try to watch again this fall.
Anyways, thanks again for your unbiased writing, it is very refreshing. I do have a suggestion. Since this is a new venture for you, I think you should write more fun/lighthearted articles at first (How Nike lost Curry is the perfect example), create a momentum, build up your subscription base, then slowly wade into the heavier/serious stuff like this piece and the Nike piece.
Again, Good luck and look forward to your future works!
How do these theories explain: (i) the next NBA TV deal is going to be massive, and the people negotiating it are motivated by purely economic factors and (ii) ratings for the Masters were also historically bad?
I'm confused by your example of your parents buying a house back in the day for 50k explaining why the next NBA TV deal (in the future) is going to be huge. I'd argue it's evidence that the NBA is very much not dying.
Ah, I don't think inflation is enough to explain it. The MLB TV deal won't go up by the same %.
This is a very good article and I agree with much of what you wrote. I was wondering, do you think another reason for the NBA's decline might also involve the increasing prevalence of superteams? In 2020, once my Pelicans were obviously not going to advance from the bubble into the playoffs, I didn't watch a second of playoff basketball (for the first time in forever). My main reason was I had absolutely no interest in Lebron and the Lakers winning another title. I agree with you the messaging on jerseys was incredibly awkward, but my main beef was I'm sick of superstars colluding to play with each other in glamour markets and (small sample size, for sure) I have many friends who feel the same way.
A drop that big is a multi factor phenomenon, so ya, the superteam effect is likely part of what happened. My main contention with these articles is a) It's multi factor and b) some factors are less taboo to discuss than others
Agreed on both the multi-factor point and the taboo factor point.