Dan Le Batard is here to speak some truth and settle some nerves around the negative news cycle the NBA is in at the moment.
Declining regular season ratings, a disastrous All-Star Game, and the continued conversation around who the next face of the league will be have all led to increasing scrutiny over the overall health of the league.
But as Dan Le Batard pointed out on his radio show, perhaps it’s time for everyone to take a deep breath and take a step back and realize just how good of a position the NBA is in for its long term health.
After all, it was just a few short months ago that the NBA signed new 11-year, $76 billion media deals with ESPN, NBC, and Amazon for their next television contracts.
If some of the richest and most powerful companies in the world are willing to give tens of billions of dollars to the NBA to air its product, then surely it can’t all be that bad, right?
“It literally doesn’t matter to the business of this whether ANYONE is watching it when it’s televised…It doesn’t matter if you watch or not, the business does not need your eyeballs.” — Dan explains why the business of the NBA is booming despite low TV ratings.
Watch:… pic.twitter.com/vQxYx4MWI3
— Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz (@LeBatardShow) February 20, 2025
“The guaranteed money that the NBA now has, it doesn’t matter if you watch or not. The business of it doesn’t need your eyeballs. You can say the sport is dying but that’s become a social media sport. People are still consuming it, they might not be consuming it at the minute you want them to, and that might hurt the next contract. But what they’re getting now? Those arenas could be empty. They got their money,” Le Batard said.
“It doesn’t matter whether they play, whether load management, whether the All-Star Game, television needs the content. They, despite the ratings decline, have gotten all the television money because all of these rich people are competing for, ‘I need to televise this’ whether people are watching it or not. It literally doesn’t matter to the business of this whether anyone is watching it when it’s televised,” he continued.
Now some of this is true. As Stugotz intervened, it matters to the networks and streaming platforms footing these billion dollar deals. If viewers disappear in droves, it hurts the ability for networks to recoup the investment on advertising and cable deals or subscriptions. And if these companies lose money on this deal, they won’t be quite as willing to dish out billions next time around.
But, Dan Le Batard’s point is valid in that the contracts for the next billion dollar deals have already been signed and the NBA is getting the money no matter how many people are watching. And his larger thesis is that this cycle is nothing new. In spite of some of these “sky is falling’ narratives circling around the league for a while, the NBA was still able to register a massive increase in rights deals for the next era with ESPN, NBC, and Amazon. The same was true after Bird and Magic, after Jordan, after Kobe, and generation after generation.
“I thought it would now! Weren’t the ratings just going down? And then the business of it opens up and there’s unbelievable amounts of money for the business of basketball,” Le Batard said.
Who knows where basketball, entertainment, or sports are going to be a decade from now. And if anything, the NBA deserves credit for adapting to new social media and streaming paradigms better than any other league. They were one of the first to truly embrace the power of YouTube and sharing cilps on social media. So as everyone (not just the NBA) sees linear ratings slowly decline, there is still an enormous reach for the association and its stars.
And odds are no matter what we think about load management and the All-Star Game, the NBA will still be relevant and healthy enough for someone to want to pay them tens of billions of dollars for a premier live sports product.
