TV Ratings: Injury-Plagued NBA Off 15 Percent

Wall Street Journal graphic

Television ratings for National Basketball Association games are down 15% so far this season, a drop that the league and its TV partners attribute to injuries that are keeping some of the NBA’s biggest stars on the sidelines.

The Wall Street Journal reports NBA games on national TV drew an average of 885,000 viewers in the U.S. in the first eight weeks of the season, according to Nielsen, compared with about one million over the same period last year and 1.2 million two years ago.

Some of the league’s marquee players, including Kevin Durant of the Brooklyn Nets and Klay Thompson of the Golden State Warriors, had been expected to miss the entire regular season recovering from injuries suffered in June. Then the New Orleans Pelicans’ Zion Williamson, one of the most highly anticipated rookies in years, hurt his knee and had surgery a day before the season’s Oct. 22 tipoff.

Days later, two-time NBA Most Valuable Player Stephen Curry broke his left hand, an injury that is expected to sideline him for months and helped turn the Warriors from one of the league’s best teams to a bottom-dweller. Other prominent players, including the Nets’ Kyrie Irving, have also missed a significant number of games.

The ratings drop has raised eyebrows among analysts who follow the world of traditional TV, where live sports are one of the few remaining reliable drivers of viewership.

Most broadcasters, including the ones that have NBA rights— AT&T Inc. ’s Turner Sports and Walt Disney Co. ’s ESPN and ABC—are fighting an uphill battle as more viewers abandon the traditional pay-TV bundle for internet-based options, said Rich Greenfield, a media and telecommunications analyst at LightShed Partners.

Other factors besides injuries could be affecting ratings. Many of the league’s best teams are on the West Coast, meaning their games end after some viewers in the East have already gone to bed. For the first time in five years, Golden State isn’t a dominant team, as a result of Mr. Durant’s decision to leave the San Francisco Bay Area for Brooklyn over the summer and Messrs. Curry and Thompson’s injuries, ending a compelling story line about a juggernaut team that attracted casual viewers to the league’s games.