NBA Playoffs 2017: Two Game 1 cable broadcasts set 6-year high and neither of them featured LeBron James or Steph Curry
Sunday’s broadcasts of the first games of the NBA Playoffs series between the Houston Rockets and Oklahoma City Thunder and the Boston Celtics and Chicago Bulls received the highest ratings for NBA first round series openers on cable since 2011.
The strength of a sports brand’s television power is best ascertained by looking at its potentially weaker products. These Game 1 cable broadcasts should be welcome news for the NBA and its broadcast partners.
According to Sports Media Watch, Game 1 of the Rockets-Thunder series on TNT Sunday delivered a 3.0 rating with 5.2 million viewers. Bulls-Celtics, which aired earlier on Sunday, pulled a 2.9 and 5.1 million.
Those numbers not only represent an increase of at least 25 percent in both ratings and viewers from the TNT Game 1 broadcasts last year, but they are the best ratings for those television products since 2011. In 2011, Game 1 of the series between the Celtics and the New York Knicks on TNT collected 6 million viewers.
What should be most encouraging for the NBA is that after a regular season worth of ratings that fluctuated on whether or not superstar players LeBron James or Steph Curry were playing, neither of these games featured Curry or James.
These series aren’t completely devoid of storylines, however. The Rockets-Thunder series could be framed around the individual rivalry for this year’s MVP award between guards James Harden and Russell Westbrook. The story of Celtics guard Isaiah Thomas’ loss of his sister prior to Boston’s game on Sunday could have also played a part in the audience for the Bulls-Celtics game.
This doesn’t mean that the ratings power of Curry and/or James has been compromised either. Curry’s Golden State Warriors series against the Portland Trail Blazers delivered the highest ratings for any NBA Playoffs first-round opener since 2002 on Sunday. That game was on broadcast television (ABC).
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If these strong ratings continue for series that don’t feature Curry or James, it will be a strong selling point for the NBA to demand higher prices for the rights to broadcast its games, and for broadcasters like TNT to demand higher prices for advertising spots during those games as well.