NBA Christmas Miracle Defused TV Ratings Crisis in One Day

Basketball is often a game of runs, and the NBA just had a big one in its viewership with the five-game slate on Christmas Day. But will it be enough to redefine the season and its current image?

Even in the wake of historic, and much larger, totals for the NFL and its streaming debut on Netflix with four Super Bowl contenders, the NBA’s average of 5.25 million viewers for its Christmas games soared by 84% from a year ago. That draw was capped with the Lakers’ win over the Warriors, which was the most-watched Christmas Day NBA game in five years at 7.76 million.

Perhaps most impactful, though, was the material shift in the NBA’s year-over-year viewership decline, which shrank from 18% before Christmas to just 4%. What had been a defining storyline of the season, even after striking transformative media rights deals kicking in next year, could soon become something else entirely.

“The NBA that everyone has grown to know and love was on display [Wednesday],” former NBA player Matt Barnes said on Instagram, part of a still-growing series of major stars that are speaking publicly on the viewership issue, and he praised the high quality of play happening throughout the day and night.

“I think it’s [commissioner] Adam Silver’s job to figure out how to bottle that up and keep the momentum,” he said.

A key factor for the NBA will be to retain at least some of this holiday energy through the next six weeks—a period traditionally dominated by the NFL playoffs—until the All-Star Game weekend, set for Feb. 14-16 in San Francisco, when basketball returns to the forefront of sports conversation. 

Postseason Watch

The individual NBA game ratings from Wednesday, meanwhile, also reaffirmed how important LeBron James, turning 40 on Monday, and 36-year-old Steph Curry still are to the league.

As the Lakers and Warriors led the way on the holiday viewership, each player starred again as James scored 31 points and Curry had a game-leading 38 in the 115-113 win for Los Angeles. Both teams, however, are still squarely on the playoff bubble. The Lakers are in sixth place in the Western Conference, only a tiebreaker removed from the play-in tournament, while the Warriors are in 10th, just a half-game out of missing the postseason entirely. 

The league’s fans, however, have yet to fully move on to the next generation of stars, and would be advantaged significantly by one or both of the aging stars and their teams reaching the playoffs and making a meaningful run.