Media Math: 91% of Adults 18-49 Spurned TV as NBA Finals Wrapped

Yahoo

11-07-2025

Nostalgia is in many ways a shoddy parlor trick, a cheap form of time travel that generally serves to mythologize one's own past at the expense of an admittedly debased present. Of course everything was better when you were younger; for one thing, you didn't make noises when you sat down.
Sports nostalgia is one of the more insidious forms of the whole misty-watercolor-memories racket, as that first flush of fandom tends to coincide with a time when most of us lack so much as a nodding acquaintance with critical thinking. (Because they're innately enthusiastic about the dumbest things—Scooby-Doo, finger foods, the Ickey Shuffle—little kids make for ideal fans.) For reasons that aren't entirely clear, probably no sports property is disadvantaged by our habit of conjuring a false Golden Age out of the stuff of remember-when than the National Basketball Association.
If you happened to reside in the greater metropolitan Boston area in 1984, you are perhaps justified in your lingering enthusiasm for Larry Bird (wicked pissah!) and the rest of that year's Celtics roster. Pretty much everybody who played on either side of the '84 NBA Finals is now enshrined in Springfield, and Boston's triumph over the Lakers in Game 7 is one of that sports-crazed town's happiest moments. While Nielsen did not make a habit of reporting absolute audience figures at the time, CBS's 19.3 household rating suggests that the broadcast averaged more than 42 million viewers.
The game itself was a sloppy slugfest, with both teams combining for 31 turnovers (Magic Johnson coughed it up no fewer than seven times, with two of those fumbles occurring in the final minute) and the Celtics shooting 39.5% from the field. And while the temperature inside the Garden didn't graze the 100°F mark, as was the case in Game 5—at times, Bird resembled a freshly parboiled Maine lobster—on-site conditions were still pretty gnarly. Welcome to Hyperhidrosis City, population 14,890.
Here's the thing about that long-ago Celtics victory: While NBA commish Adam Silver would probably blow up the moon for a shot at a TV turnout of 42 million people, the reality is that a delivery of that magnitude is effectively impossible in this day and age. Reverse-engineer the Nielsen data and marvel at just how many American households were huddled around the tube 41 years ago. In light of a total universe of 84.9 million TV homes (a pittance compared to today's 125.8 million) and CBS's 19.3 rating/33 share, we can extrapolate that 49.7 million residences had their sets switched on as the Celtics were closing out the Lakers. That translates to a staggering 58.5% HUT level, or if you'd prefer to dispense with the media measurement jargon, a usage rate of nearly 59%.
Now, any guess as to what the HUT/usage rate was during Fox's Feb. 9 broadcast of Super Bowl LIX, a game that served up some 114.1 million traditional TV impressions? How's 50.5% grab you?
You read that right; on television's biggest night, about half of the country may as well have unplugged their TV sets. All things being equal, CBS's broadcast of the 1984 Raiders-Redskins title tilt coincided with an interval during which 65.4% of all Americans had their TVs in use.
Setting aside the outsized role out-of-home measurement now plays in arriving at the present-day Super Bowl deliveries, Fox would have reached approximately 82.3 million TV homes last February if it had been fortunate enough to broadcast the Chiefs-Eagles scrap while 65.4% of all sets were up and running. That would have been good for a net gain of 18.7 million households, and while the OOH factor makes for an apples-to-road-apples comparison (approximately 21% of the Super Bowl LIX audience watched the game from someone else's couch/banquette/barstool), a 65.4% usage rate would have powered Fox past the 150 million-viewer mark.
History buffs will note that the HUT levels for the Watergate hearings maxed out at 93.9%, or just a hair shy of the usage rates during the Apollo 11 moon landing on July 20, 1969. Given that level of tune-in, Fox's Super Bowl broadcast would've been viewed by something like 296.3 million Americans—and only one of these events was staged! (Do you really expect us to believe that Patrick Mahomes would stink up the joint that badly? Only Stanley Kubrick and the CIA could dream up a scenario in which Mahomes' 11.4 QBR would pass the smell test.)
While we're having fun with math and parallel-universe theories, let's have a look at the deciding game of this year's NBA Finals. ABC was the beneficiary of a huge Game 7 spike, as its broadcast of the Thunder's breezy 103-91 clincher over the Pacers averaged 16.6 million viewers, a step up from the preliminary returns and good for a 79% lift compared to the previous game. (At the risk of telling tales out of school, even a few NBA execs were surprised by the big boost, given the series' overall stasis between Games 1 and 6.)
More to the point, Game 7 of Indy-OKC drew a 7.64 rating/26 share, which translates to 29.4% TV usage on the night of June 22. A HUT level hovering near the 30% mark is about as good as it gets on an early-summer Sunday, although each year has seen those numbers slide ever closer to the doldrums. In 2019, while the Raptors were putting the Warriors to sleep in Game 6 of their Finals showdown, 48.6% of the TV universe had their sets in use. If ABC had been fortunate enough to air the Pacers-Thunder finale when nearly half of the TV-owning crowd had their units switched on, this year's broadcast conceivably would have clocked in at around 24.9 million viewers.
All of which is a somewhat roundabout way of suggesting that the NBA's TV numbers were a lot stronger than they looked on paper. But drill down another level and the challenges facing the legacy networks are grim indeed.
Using the same ratings/share calculus that informed the greater audience dynamic, a somewhat alarming demographic picture begins to emerge. While nothing gets a marketer's heart racing like the quixotic desire to overcome scarcity, the vanishing dollar demos should discourage this kind of self-defeating strategy. As Shai Gilgeous-Alexander raised the O'Brien Trophy to the rafters, only 8.9% of the 134.1 million adults 18-49 were perched in front of their TVs. That's quite a bit off the pace from the analogous night in 2019, when nearly 20% of all adults under 50 were watching TV, and worlds apart from the 30% rates that were standard throughout the aughts.
And even the mighty NFL isn't impervious to the ravages of demographic drift, although the league's absolute deliveries of the under-50 set remain the gold standard. On Dec. 29, 2024, the 17th Sunday of the NFL's regular-season campaign, primetime and late-afternoon usage among adults 18-49 came in at 9.4%. When fewer than 10% of this all-important audience segment is watching TV during a crucial NFL weekend, there's no use in trying to look the other way.
Predictably enough, the situation with younger adults is more dire still. Despite boasting a whopping 71% share of viewers in the 18-34 demo, ABC's absolute delivery during Game 7 clocked in at a somewhat understated 3.13 million adults under 35. You can lead a Millennial to water, but you cannot make him drink (unless of course there's some sort of TikTok hydration challenge going on), and ABC's broadcast coincided with a night in which only 6.2% of the 18-34 universe was parked in front of a TV. Just six years ago, the average 18-34 usage rate for the month of June was 13.4%. Already the hardest-to-reach of the primary TV demos, the under-35 set is now about as inaccessible as the sunward side of Mercury.
Fortunately, the various streaming platforms that ride sidecar with the primary ratings engine of TV are recapturing a healthy percentage of the younger crowd who represent the future of sports consumption. All but immune to the lean-back charms of traditional TV, the 18-34 demo hasn't tuned out entirely, although given their mounting importance in the overall scheme of things, the great digital transition can't happen soon enough.
Given enough time, they'll be the ones mooning over an unattainable Golden Age, only instead of waxing nostalgic about demolished sweatboxes and the Hick from French Lick, this ascendant wave of fans will be remembering a far more virtual universe. The rest of us will play out the string to the sound of a mule chomping into a soggy carrot whenever we bend any of our synovial joints. Call it what it is: Nostalgia is merely a sort of homesickness for a time when you weren't all harried and creaky.
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