[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

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u/EmuMan10 Suns 1d ago

Yeah the series in baseball do help with this. Despite having a much longer season, the interest hasn’t dropped for baseball but grown. They also took away some of the stuff making it less entertaining. Incentivizing stealing, getting rid of the shift, the pitch clock, all of that helped them without fundamentally altering the game

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u/fuckitimgoingdeep Rockets 1d ago

It's also nice as a fan if you lose to a team you usually have a chance to play them again tomorrow and get even.

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u/epheisey Pistons 1d ago

I'll admit that the recent changes have helped recent trends, but it's a stretch to claim that series in baseball really help. Those have existed forever, and viewership had been in a decline more or less since 2000. Interest in baseball has grown compared to say the last few seasons, but they're still well below their 2016, 2017 numbers, which were also lower than their numbers in the early 2000s.

And it certainly helps that the last World Series included the two most popular teams in the world.

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u/EmuMan10 Suns 1d ago

Well they’re never matching the ratings of 2016. That’s the outlier of interest for baseball because of the cubs breaking the curse