NBA Finals: Does Market Size Of Thunder, Pacers Matter? No, Says One Ratings Analyst

After all, Oklahoma City is the nation’s 47th-ranked television market. Indiana is 25th. New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and others? Nowhere to be found.

But that doesn’t necessarily mean a whole lot, former Fox Sports senior VP Patrick Crakes told Zach Oasterman of the Indianapolis Star.

“The NBA Finals is a national event. It’s better to have a base from big-market teams, from a mass of viewing, but the whole ecosystem is much more complicated than that,” said Crakes, who now runs a media consulting firm.

More telling than the size of the Finalists’ markets is how long a series goes, Crakes and others have repeatedly indicated. So a competitive series is a bigger deal than which cities are represented.

“Postseason economics, a lot of it gets determined by the first couple rounds,” Crakes told the Star. “That’s where all the inventory is.”

It also means something to have young, up-and-coming stars, and this series will feature plenty. That includes Thunder guard and NBA MVP Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and dynamic Pacers point man Tyrese Haliburton, among many others.

Both teams also play an exciting and effective brand of basketball.

“If you think about a total package of how NBA rights work,” Crakes said, “it’s important to keep in mind that small-market finals, like what we’re about to see, that feature some of the game’s best young players, that are going to be around for the next 15 years, being showcased, is not a bad thing for the league.”

Ratings aside, NBA fans should get used to the idea that parity has arrived and the window is generally wide open — giving franchises in any market a chance. That’s what pro sports should be about.

“The system’s working. The small-market teams are figuring out ways to compete with the big-market teams,” Crakes said. “This is an opportunity for these smaller markets to continue to have a deeper relationship with the NBA.”

He went on to predict that great basketball will always be a strong sell. These Finals could very well feature exactly that.

“This is going to be a gigantic number,” Crakes said. “It’s going to rate better than anything else, probably anything else at this point in the summer, and the economics are already largely in the bank.”

Game 1 tips off Thursday in Oklahoma City at 8:30 p.m. EST on ABC.