Interesting article in TIME about severe attendance issues among many NBA teams. This is not to say that NBA is failing, or that soccer will bypass it anytime soon, but many of the sales strategies we bemoan in our teams are used commonly elsewhere as well. http://business.time.com/2013/01/14/nba-teams-struggle-to-fill-arenas-even-when-cheap-seats-are-1- or-free/
Another obvious culprit: the insane number of games they play. When you pad the bottom line by having, oh, five times as many games as you really need, then obviously attendances will decline over time.
NBA is suffering because its best teams are Oklahoma City and the LA Clippers. Makes it kind of hard to chant "Beat LA ... Clip-pers".
The Pistons wouldn't be having these issues if they had an arena in the heart of downtown so all the hipsters could walk or take public transport...
This article just highlights the difference between 41 games and tons of weeknight games and mostly weekend games. Everyone talks about how awesome NFL attendance is for example but if more than half its games were on weeknights I wonder how much that would affect things. MLS is actually pretty lucky that a large percentage of its games are on the weekend. Even more if you include Friday night which seems to have increase in regularity this year.
It might be as simple that the level of play in the NBA has become unwatchable. What passes nowadays for a regular season game in 2013 compared to regular season games in 1993, 20 seasons ago, it is often shit basketball. Playoff time gives incentive to these current NBA players thus the product on display vastly improves so perhaps folks are staying away until playoff time. The arenas still do fill up for playoffs.
The tickets can be quite expensive-at least the lower bowl. So perhaps there's a large group of people who might go to a game here or there who instead are habituated to watch on tv instead. So when the freebies come up, they have little effect.
The problem with the NBA in that regard is that it is somewhat at cross purposes with itself. You go to an NBA game (and this is much more true than in college) and you quickly get the message that it is a made for TV product. But it's a made for TV product that plays so many games that any given one (even if it's between two contenders) isn't really an 'event'. Obviously '5 times as many' is overdoing it, but people found out last year that even the reduced schedule the NBA operated on was still more than enough to figure out who's playoff-worthy and who isn't. Obviously, that's even more true in baseball--but the live experience also isn't configured the same way, it isn't as pompous or grandiose. (And to be fair, most baseball markets also sell some of their tickets quite cheap and yet a bunch of them still don't sell; that's down to the pure logistics of asking a market to come 81 times.) The NBA (and NHL) are stuck in a no-man's land between the attendance-oriented MLB and the basically TV-oriented NFL.
After last year's NBA and this year's NHL I wonder if the sports wouldn't be better served (from a sporting/interest perspective, not a financial one) to becoming winter-spring sports. Start the seasons with the Christmas Day games (for the NBA) and the Winter Classic (for the NHL) and go. But yeah, owners would never go for it, they need the arena dates.
Make the baskets a few feet higher so your average thyroid-diseased-freak has to actually jump to score and I'll consider giving it another chance.
Beyond the ignorance of the thyroid comment, the height of the basket isn't the issue. The court is too short/narrow for the modern NBA athlete. It was designed, accurately, for a much smaller and less athletic set of people and has simply been outgrown.
Never really understood the hype or excitement of basketball. The concept of running back and forth on a small court and scoring every 10 seconds is quite boring.
I gave up on NBA decade or so ago (whenever Jordan retired...the second time when Buggs Bunny could not bring him back) but have remained loyal to College Basketball, especially in March to watch UK. To me the NBA simply had no substance so while it was the same sport it had nothing of the feel of the college game. It is funny to think a player could go from Rupp or Cameron (or several others) use to playing in front of packed house and end making millions playing in half full arenas.
Well, they say that about soccer goals too (and physically speaking, it's true). I think there is some truth to the idea that NBA stars are 'too good', though. 30 or 40 years ago, they actually had to run plays, where for about the last generation you could actually have a game plan that consisted of 'force it to our franchise player and let him force up shots off-balance and with a hand in his face, because on a good day he can still go 21-for-33 doing that.' On the promise(/hope) that TV revenues would go up. . . uh. . . eventually. Yeah, I can't see the idea winning any popularity contests even if it might be the best plan in the long run. "In the long run, we're all retired."
It's always fun to read utter nonsense about the NBA, that they don't play defense, or travel all the time, or don't run plays, don't try until the playoffs, or there are too many games (OK that one is totally totally true). It's rot - the quality of play in the NBA is at a very good level right now and so much better played than college ball it almost defies description. It also has a good crop of young players from all over the world who are fun to watch and have enjoyable personalities and purposely defy the straight-up racist trope of 'NBA thugs' by wearing Urkel outfits. If you don't like basketball, then you don't like basketball, so what? The attendance problems indicate how poorly ownership has managed the league. They are laying in a bed of their own making, having destroyed arena atmospheres with corporate gimmicks and overpricing the product when it had a momentary popularity spike. Regular folks stopped going to games and lost the habit of going - I did anyway - and now giving away tickets is just further devaluing the product. The NFL can turn games into sound stage shows and still get people to come, but the NBA has made games with endless stoppages in play and blaring music, so that when it stops it leaves one sitting in a tomb. MLS' terrible TV ratings are a blessing for those of us that go to games - they have so much incentive to make the game atmosphere compelling. Hopefully, NBA owners will one day come to the same conclusion and look to college ball and European crowds to see how much fun a basketball game can be, especially when played by the world's best players - but as long as they are in thrall to TV cash what will change (it won't, but games with better atmosphere would make the TV viewing experience much better, if only someone had enough foresight to think long-term)?