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Adam Silver Doesn’t Care if You Can’t Afford to Watch the NBA
By Kyle Pagan
Published:
This is a wild answer for an NBA Commissioner to give:
If you’re too poor to watch the NBA, I hope you enjoy the highlights on YouTube, you beggar! What an answer. On one hand, Silver works for the billionaires and not the fans and he already has the deals signed, sealed, and delivered. On the other, he’s basically saying his league isn’t interesting enough for people to watch full games anyway. Imagine being a TV partner and hearing this. Thanks for those billions you just cut us, our fans don’t even watch!
Who knew NBA Twitter was a bunch of non-ball knowers who only consume basketball in 30-second clips?
Of course, the answer does go more in-depth than just a 30 second clip. Here’s more from Silver claiming there will be more games on broadcast TV than ever before, via @JonesOnTheNBA:
ADAM SILVER: I think about it a lot. I will say, I saw the story your publication ran. You took all the different streaming services and added them up and what those costs would be. I look at it a little bit differently, because most people can only consume so many games. By way of one example, in these new media deals, we’re going from essentially 15 exposures on broadcast television to 75. So to the extent someone wants to put little rabbit ears on their television, you can still get 75 marquee games in essence for free in the marketplace.
Sure, there will be more games on broadcast television, but what if you’re a Knicks fan and you have 34 national games spread out? Only 14 of those are on broadcast TV. Are you just supposed to miss the 20 games that are on Amazon Prime, ESPN, and Peacock? That’s where a lot of the leagues are going to start losing people. Fans don’t want to decide if they should buy eggs this week or pay for NBA League Pass. They just want to watch their team. I just tried to check if I could consolidate packages for the Eagles, Sixers, Phillies, and Flyers to get a cheaper rate and I gave up after two hours and just kept YouTube TV. I could do a 1,000 words on how Comcast and Peacock’s site is such dog shit, but that’s for another time. Streaming is a shit show right now. I’ve got 15 different networks a game could be on. I had buddies that didn’t know the Chiefs/Chargers game was free on YouTube because they assumed it was exclusive to YouTube TV because that’s what we’ve been trained to expect. I mean WWE has switched partners what feels like three times in the last year. I thought I read it’d be exclusively on Netflix then they turn around and have ESPN exclusive events. The UFC just switched to Paramount+. The NFL is going to be playing games on 20 different streamers it feels like this season. It’s a mess but we’ll keep on coming back – well most of us. Not NBA fans. They’re watching subsidized content on an Obama phone apparently.
Kyle writes blog posts and does Man on the Street-style videos all around Philadelphia. He graduated from Temple University (a basketball school) in 2015. contact: k.pagan@sportradar.com