[Rankin] ... Kevin Durant continuing to address #NBA viewership being down. "I take this serious. I'm locked in as to why people don't want to watch us play."

https://x.com/DuaneRankin/status/1872176949801504956?t=sOlhzun3lYo5ImePn8Xpwg&s=19

6.5k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

u/jawadhaque089 1d ago

Pretty funny how no one in this thread knows the real issue none of the stars at the top are interesting for casuals besides LeBron and Steph

13

u/BiggieBoiTroy Thunder 1d ago

so what you’re saying is we need Bol Bol to start co-dating Taylor Swift?

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u/Drummallumin [BOS] Marcus Smart 1d ago

Seriously, casual viewership isn’t down because their favorite team is blacked out on league pass 6 times a year lol.

4

u/_Hollywood___ Lakers 1d ago

We need Jayson Tatum to find a personality and Brown to stop sniffing his own farts. Maybe they might make a casual fan give a fuck about the NBA by accident.

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u/Donut_boii 1d ago

This is definitely true. The new guys just dont bring the same aura as LeBron, kd, Steph, etc. only players are maybe lamelo ball, ja, and ant they popular with the young generation

24

u/LTPRWSG420 Pistons 1d ago

Bro you just mentioned LaMelo Ball as one of the top young stars, that’s the main problem right there lol.

2

u/Donut_boii 1d ago

It’s a shame he’s playing on the hornets. Literally any other team other than the hornets and he’d get a lot more attention

0

u/Illustrious_Way_5732 Nets 1d ago

What's wrong with that?

9

u/Logical_Chipmunk2872 1d ago

He’s never had a winning season in his career

-8

u/Illustrious_Way_5732 Nets 1d ago

Top young stars in terms of popularity and being a face of the league, which OP was talking about. Ball is def up there the kids love him

1

u/RddtAcct707 1d ago

When Ja isn’t suspended…

3

u/poketape Bulls 1d ago

I got downvoted on draft night for pointing out how unattractive it is for the casual American fan to see a foreign player drafted number one two years in a row. It's not a good sign for the long-term prospects of the league when American fans are the most profitable.

4

u/Uro06 1d ago edited 1d ago

Had to go down so far to find the true answer. The nba has dug its own grave. It has always marketed itself as a players league first. NBA basketball was always about the superstars and storylines and less about the teams playing. This works fine as long as you have those stars and storylines. But the current crop of star players are either not good enough or not marketable enough for the casual public. Americans notoriously don’t care about international players and which casual fan is saying „Oh Tatum is playing, let’s watch that“

And the second big issue is, that without these storylines and superstars, the NBA doesn’t have much to offer. Because let’s be frank the actual product/sport is terrible to watch. No casual fan is tuning in to watch 2 random teams play because sitting through a regular season game is literal torture.

These casual fans don’t tune in to watch random teams play for the sake of the sport. So you have to catch them with entertaining storylines and superstars. But when you also don’t have that anymore then you’re fucked

What the NBA needs to do is make the sport more interesting to watch first and foremost and most importantly not hell to sit through because matches take 3 hours to end. That means:

shorten the regular seasons so matches actually mean something

reduce the ridiculous number of timeouts

reduce the ridiculous number of foul calls

make defense more viable

Then make the sport and the teams the focus of the league and marketing and not the players. So that maybe regular Joe might tune in to watch the Nuggets play the Wolves. Not because he cares about the players but because he wants to watch the game itself.

But the problem is, all of the above fixes would result in massive cuts to revenue. For players, owners and the league. So they aren’t actually interested in dealing with the true reasons for lowering interest because dealing with them would directly result in less money for them. So they will think of some bullshit measures to increase interest like the mid season tournament and then act suprised every year why ratings go down.

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u/LTPRWSG420 Pistons 1d ago

Yeah we went from Jordan to Kobe and Kobe to LeBron, but LeBron literally has no one to pass the mantle too. I don’t think that’s ever happened before.

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u/zts105 NBA 1d ago

It was supposed to be Zion.

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u/Dramatic-Cap-6785 1d ago

It’s mostly just because no one watches cable lmfao it’s not a mystery.

1

u/CaskJeeves Raptors 1d ago

If all the games were on cable it would be 100x easier to watch and more people probably would.

The real issue is that you need cable plus like 3 different streaming services to catch all of your home teams games, that's enough to put almost everyone off

1

u/ThatBull_cj 76ers Bandwagon 1d ago

And their teams are obviously mediocre