The NBA is one of the most popular sports leagues in the world and just shocked everyone with a massive 11-year, $76 billion media rights deal.
Yet if you look at the media landscape around the NBA, the vibe is quite different. Nobody is celebrating the league’s record incoming revenues or the enormous depth of talent competing on-court every night across the league.
Instead, sports hosts have taken turns shredding the league for most of the past several months and years. Partially guided by decreasing viewership and a lack of young star power, even those who love basketball have taken a more critical approach toward the NBA lately.
There may be a glimmer of truth in this suddenly negative commentary around the state of the NBA, but the problem is each take is hard to fully prove. Some try to diagnose what ails the league to fix it and offer genuine critiques; others pounce on the bad vibes to push their pet issues. That makes it hard for anyone working in the league or covering it to properly take stock of the NBA at this peculiar inflection point.
Beyond the specifics of how basketball and the NBA have changed, there are also macro factors affecting every sport. People have more content options than ever. Illegal streaming websites are impossible to muzzle. It is easy to follow sports and stars online without watching games. Still, there are specific evolutions associated with the NBA worth examining.
With that in mind, we have compiled all the knocks people have against the league in one place, in this hater’s guide to all the NBA’s alleged problems:
1. The 82-game regular season is too long
This is the easiest and most common argument to make, but it’s also one of the more complicated ideas to unpack.
Around the time that the NBA was negotiating its new media rights package, the idea of basketball being an “inventory sport” was praised as part of its value to networks and streamers. The league may not be appointment viewing every night, but there are enough mini-events between October and April to drive value.
That same dynamic is also used to highlight why the NBA season bores the average fan. It’s familiar to anyone who cares about hockey or baseball.
The criticism is valid. An 82-game season packs less punch per game than the NFL’s 17-game slate or even the English Premier League’s 34-match schedule. But from a different angle, that volume of games is indeed a plus for the league’s popularity.
Last regular season, local television viewership for 17 of 27 measurable teams saw a spike. As more teams put their games on free broadcast television instead of cable RSNs, fans are tuning in. The league also celebrated record attendance last season.
Those are the reasons NBA owners will be resistant to shortening the season. That doesn’t change the very real fact that it is hard to manufacture importance (see: the NBA Cup) over a long season. The storylines and narratives that draw fans in are watered down when they play out over six months.
2. NBA stars are not on the court often enough
This is linked to the regular season conversation, so let’s package them together.
It is an incontrovertible fact that NBA athletes are not on the court as much as they used to be. Between minute limits, load management, and legitimate injuries, it is all too common these days to hear stories of fans buying tickets and missing out on seeing their favorite players. That’s not to mention all the nationally televised games, like the upcoming Christmas Day tilt between Philadelphia and Boston, with stars out or questionable.
It’s easy to call NBA stars soft, and maybe compared with hockey or rugby athletes, they are. As in soccer, the proliferation of spread-out, run-and-gun styles that maximize offensive output has increased injuries in basketball. Soft tissue injuries are more common for players who are now asked to change direction and speed more aggressively than ever before to cover more space and execute these schemes.
The league has tried to solve this issue by mandating 65 games played for end-of-season awards as well as instituting fines for improper injury management. The interesting part of this complaint is that its figureheads are Joel Embiid, Kawhi Leonard, and Zion Williamson, stars who for different reasons all struggle with actual injuries each season.
3. The pace-and-space era makes for boring basketball
It is no surprise that this aspect of the anti-NBA conversation would start after the Boston Celtics won the championship. Under head coach Joe Mazzulla, the Celtics have pushed the boundaries of modern offense. This season, more than half of Boston’s shots are from deep.
From Shaquille O’Neal to Nick Wright, this hobby horse has become more popular over time. The problem is that it is so vague. Many people miss the old NBA, but what do they miss about it? If I worked in the league office, that’s the question I would be trying to answer.
In the mid-2000s era, some of the most viral videos and posts online would have you think the league should be trying to recreate was so unpopular and such a big eyesore that it led to significant rule changes. People may think they want Kobe Bryant-style iso basketball, but they told the league with their viewing habits two decades ago that they, in fact, did not.
Plus, simply looking at the best players in the league shows that styles from team to team are anything but equal. Sure, every team has thinned out the margins by taking more threes and playing faster. But Giannis Antetkounmpo and Joel Embiid rarely take threes. Nikola Jokić is a basketball purist’s dream. Shai Gilgeous-Alexander plays like Penny Hardaway or Paul Pierce. Luka Dončić may be the hardest watch of the top guys, but his closest comparison is probably LeBron James, who is enormously popular and one of the greatest players ever. That’s not to mention that Steph Curry may be the most popular NBA player of the past decade, and he was central to ushering in the three-point revolution.
4. The best players and teams are less captivating than previous eras
Setting aside style, the league may simply be in a lull when it comes to killer teams and stars.
Due to the NBA’s relentless chase of parity through well-documented changes to its salary cap, dynasties are dead for now. Fans have gotten a different NBA Finals matchup in each of the past five years, with no repeat conference champions in that span. That evolution makes sense to level the playing field and keep fans in Milwaukee or Oklahoma City happy, but it also put an end to the captivating dynasties in Golden State, San Antonio, or Los Angeles that fans embraced in the 2000s.
At the same time, the NBA yearns for a post-Curry, post-James star it can hitch its wagon to. Just as when Michael Jordan retired, it’s taking a minute to find them. The league suffered a major setback when its marquee 2019 draft class featuring Zion Williamson and Ja Morant disappeared in a cloud of controversy and injury over the past few years. Anthony Edwards and Victor Wembanyama don’t seem ready to take over, and they play in tiny cities.
Is a lack of mainstream star power contributing to the NBA’s ratings decline? @BenAxelrod and @BrendonKleen14 discuss on the latest episode of The Play-By-Play.
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So the league and its media partners are left chasing their tails with more Lakers and Warriors talk, waiting for something better to get fans’ attention.
5. It is harder to watch the NBA than ever before
Blame the fall of cable television if you want, but the rhythms of NBA fandom were built around it. Fans knew they could turn on their TVs each night and flip between their local RSN and TNT or ESPN and get a nice dose of basketball. Now, games are split between some combination of free linear television, more obscure cable networks, and streaming packages. That will only get worse when Prime Video and Peacock get involved in 2025.
I don’t fully buy the idea that this situation is to blame for declining NBA viewership since it affects every sport to some degree. Just ask a college football fan about keeping track of where their team’s game is (and that sport is exploding). But it’s certainly true that is no longer as simple or smooth to consume basketball as it once was.
6. Media coverage of the NBA is actively working against it
Even before this moment in time where seemingly the only NBA coverage on a national scale was about how to fix the league, thoughtful basketball analysis was hard to come by on the biggest platforms. Perhaps the endless transactions and celebrity status of the stars give media an easy out from covering the actual sport, but there are precious few places that a sports fan can tune in and become smarter or more curious about the NBA.
At ESPN, producers have twisted themselves in a pretzel trying to execute the seemingly simple task of assembling a capable studio show. They settled on letting Stephen A. Smith and Michael Wilbon hot-take their way through the problem.
At TNT, the most legendary sports studio show ever is clearly a net positive for the league. But Inside the NBA isn’t exactly flush with deep analysis of the sport, and often trends negatively too.
Meanwhile, ESPN couldn’t find room on its balance sheet for a basketball evangelical like Zach Lowe, who loves the sport enough that he still tweets out a granular nightly NBA recap while he cashes severance checks from the Walt Disney Co.
Unlike the NFL, where digital and traditional media coverage of the sport is a legitimate cottage industry, basketball talk is drowned out largely by the most critical voices.
7. The league and its players are too ‘woke’ and focused on social justice issues
This reputation has proven quite sticky for the NBA, which certainly emphasized social issues in its 2020 Bubble but largely has not engaged directly with politics since then. Back then, the NBA placed social justice messaging on its jerseys and courts in the Bubble, orchestrated kneeling during the national anthem, and gave its players and coaches the green light to speak freely about controversial topics in press conferences. Viewership plummeted during its late summer season and early fall Finals, yet it largely left all of that in Orlando.
Nevertheless, the racial justice uprisings across the country in 2020 prickled many people. If everyday sports fans still strongly associate the NBA with these issues, that lingering impact could be hurting the league now.
As with some of the macro issues outlined in the introduction of this piece, the NBA is not the only league that embraced social justice in 2020 — or since. The NFL also encouraged personnel to kneel during the national anthem and donated tens of millions of dollars to racial justice causes. Major League Baseball moved its All-Star game from Atlanta in 2021 and just experienced a great 2024 season driven by rule changes and a star-studded World Series. The Premier League still features “No Room For Racism” messaging on its kits and broadcast branding.
While it’s easy to buy that some fans turned up their noses at “Black Lives Matter” jerseys in 2020, it would seem that if the other issues on this list disappeared, this talking point would as well.
