Big viewership for Cavs-Thunder should quiet NBA ratings talk

ESPN broadcast a matchup between the league-leading Cavs and Thunder this week to an audience that peaked at 2.5M viewers, averaging 1.87M. It was a thrilling game, featuring 30 lead changes and a down-to-the-wire battle that ended in a 129-122 Cleveland victory.

That's 20 percent better than the comparable time period last season. The ratings also defied some of the popular theories about why ratings are "down a bit," in the words of NBA commissioner Adam Silver.

First, neither Cleveland nor Oklahoma City is a big market. Based on Nielsen figures for the 2023-24 season, Cleveland is the NBA's 19th-biggest media market, while OKC is 28th. That didn't seem to matter for their battle, nor has it hurt in All-Star voting, where OKC's Shai Gilgeous-Alexander is the leading vote-getting among Western Conference guards, and Donovan Mitchell is second among Eastern guards.

The viewers weren't scared away by the three-point volume, with the teams combining for 67 three-point attempts in the game. There was a fair amount of scoring from bigs Jarrett Allen, Evan Mobley and Isaiah Hartenstein, who are excellent players but hardly household names.

This comes after the NBA saw an 84 percent increase in its viewership for its slate of Christmas Day games, with the Denver Nuggets-Phoenix Suns clash delivering the most viewers for a late game in the history of the holiday games.

NBA ratings rely on a complicated number of factors, but the ratings decline early in the season and for the NBA Cup likely says more about the decline in cable viewership in general than the NBA specifically. One of the NBA's biggest broadcasters, Bally Sports, declared bankruptcy in 2023, throwing regional cable coverage into chaos.

Wednesday proves that no matter what pundits might claim about the NBA's decline or the unimportance of the regular season, there will always be an audience for high-level, competitive NBA basketball. Even if Max Strus and Isaiah Joe are shooting a lot of threes.