The Weekside: Andre Iguodala’s long, strange trip to becoming NBA Finals MVP
By Jared Wade
For the Watch
The six games of the NBA Finals averaged 19.9 million viewers in the United States, good for a 11.6 rating from Nielsen. This obliterated the 9.3 rating of last year’s championship series, and made the 2015 Finals the highest-rated non-Shaq/Kobe Finals since the NBA’s heyday.
These viewer numbers still don’t touch the peaks of national interest that Michael Jordan drew. His six Finals appearances garnered a ratings range from a low of 14.2 (against the Portland Trailblazers in 1992) to a high of 18.7 (against the Utah Jazz in his last series for the Chicago Bulls in 1998).
But that was MJ, a unique sports figure if ever there was one.
Considering the fractured entertainment landscape that exists in 2015, an 11.6 rating is enormous. The world now has way more entertainment to capture its attention, and Michael Jordan never played in Finals games that went head-to-head with a show that had a rabid fanbase like Game of Thrones does. Television shows were very popular and widely watched in the 1990s, but they rarely had the type of cultural resonance of the Mother of Dragons and the White Walkers.
With interest piqued and many marketable stars, the league is in a very good place.
But seeing these numbers makes you wonder whether the NBA could have gotten an even better deal now on TV contract. The agreement the league signed last year with ABC/ESPN and TNT was unprecedented for basketball, with the networks paying a combined $24 billion over nine years to broadcast games.
It’s hard to believe, but perhaps that that enormous figure — which will push TV revenue from the current $930 million per year to $2.66 billion each season after the new deal begins in 2016-17 — could have been even larger if they waited for the world to be captivated by LeBron James and Steph Curry.
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