Adam Silver Defends NBA Product Amid Sluggish Ratings

Shaquille O’Neal recently blamed too much three-point shooting for the NBA’s poor ratings so far this season. On The Big Podcast with Shaq, the Hall of Fame center and TNT analyst recently said the Warriors and star player Steph Curry are among those who have contributed to the monotony. 

“We’re looking at the same thing,” O’Neal said. “Everybody is running the same plays. And [the Warriors] messed it up. I don’t mind Golden State back in the day shooting threes, but every team isn’t a three-point shooter. So why [does] everybody have the same strategy? I think it makes the game boring.”

NBA commissioner Adam Silver has a different point of view. “I don’t think it has anything to do with the three-point shot,” Silver said in an interview with Cheddar that came out Friday. The ratings dip can be attributed to the particulars of the calendar and the fierce competition for viewers’ attention, he said. Viewership for NBA games has dropped double digits through the opening weeks of the regular season, according to Sports Media Watch.

“I think we’re just looking at a couple weeks of ratings,” Silver said. “There’s always some unique things. This year we were up against the World Series, Dodgers-Yankees, two very attractive teams, they brought in a big audience. You had a presidential election which was commanding an enormous amount of attention. So I don’t think it has anything whatsoever to do with the style of play on the floor.”

Silver said the NBA’s social media traffic is at an all-time high, and the league boasts more followers across its platforms than the NHL and MLB combined. (The official NBA X/Twitter account has 47.4 million followers and 22.9 million followers on TikTok; MLB has 12 million followers on X and 7.8 million on TikTok, for comparison.) When asked about the NBA’s social media standing compared to its peers, Silver said he doesn’t look at it that way. 

“We compare ourselves to, frankly, the biggest brands in the world,” Silver said. “Two years ago, we were one of the top five search terms on Google globally—the NBA, its teams, its players. I feel it’s almost too limiting to compare us to another sports league.” 

Silver was also enthusiastic about the league’s upcoming streaming partnership with Amazon, which is part of the NBA’s new media-rights deal that starts next season. He called Amazon “one of the best consumer-facing companies in the world,” and he said the league now has the ability to cater more to its consumers than ever before as streaming grows and evolves. 

“If they begin to innovate and say now we can customize telecasts for people who are hardcore fans that can hear one feed, for people who are just learning the game, for people who want more of a comical take on the game such as a ManningCast,” Silver said, “there’s unlimited opportunities there. People who want to shop while they’re watching, people who want some sort of gamification, people who want to bet, frankly, where it’s legal. All of those things become possible to create much more individual personalized experiences.”