Cary Edmondson-Imagn Images

Dan Le Batard Gets Brutally Honest About The NBA's TV Ratings

Originally posted on The Spun | By Andrew Gould | Last updated Feb 20, 2025 2:53 PM ET

Fans continue to fixate over the NBA's sliding ratings, but Dan Le Batard argued that it's not hurting the league at all.

Ratings have decreased during the 2024-25 season, and viewership for Sunday's All-Star Game dropped 13 percent from last year. Some onlookers may interpret those dips as a potential crisis, but the NBA recently landed an 11-year, $76 billion media rights deal with ESPN, NBC, and Amazon.

On his Thursday show, Le Batard said ratings "don't matter" to the NBA because of those lucrative broadcasting contracts. The Meadowlark Media founder also noted that fans are still paying attention to the product in different ways.

"The guaranteed money that the NBA now has, it doesn’t matter if you watch or not," Le Batard said. "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."

“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

Amid complaints of load management and an uncompetitive All-Star Game, the NBA is still getting paid because "all of these rich people are competing for" live content

"It literally doesn't matter to the business of this whether anyone is watching it when it's televised," Le Batard claimed.

DETROIT, MICHIGAN - FEBRUARY 03: A Wilson brand official game ball basketball is pictured with the NBA logo during the game between the Detroit Pistons and Charlotte Hornets at Little Caesars Arena on February 03, 2023 in Detroit, Michigan. (Photo by Nic Antaya/Getty Images)Nic Antaya/Getty Images

Jon "Stugotz" Weiner argued that decreasing ratings would eventually hurt the NBA. However, Le Batard pointed out that it didn't impact the league's media rights negotiations last year.

"I thought it would now," Le Batard responded. "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 figured the pandemic, Kyrie Irving's promotion of anti-Semitic material, and the load management outcry would have damaged the NBA's bottom line. Instead, streaming platforms made big plays for its games.

"They got monster dollars because if it's [Amazon founder Jeff] Bezos competing against Netflix for 'We need the content,' there's a never-ending stream of money that makes the customer irrelevant."

This article first appeared on The Spun and was syndicated with permission.

More must-reads: