Will small-market Finals bother the NBA? Not necessarily. 'This is the league's future here'

Indianapolis Star

a day ago

OKLAHOMA CITY – Big stars. Small markets.
That's been the verdict on these NBA Finals since the Pacers closed out the Eastern Conference playoffs over the weekend and sealed their place opposite Oklahoma City in this year's NBA Finals.
And in the most basic telling, that is an accurate summation of the forthcoming series. But the public's (and the media's) love of easily digestible Nielsen ratings and viewership numbers glosses over what is in many ways a more nuanced discussion.
Will Indianapolis and Oklahoma City make for a less commercially successful Finals? Not necessarily.
It's important to acknowledge upfront there is some truth to the basic maxims of the TV-market discussion. In most cases, yes, pulling a major audience share like New York, Chicago, Boston, Los Angeles or even Dallas-Fort Worth makes for a better-watched series.
That just doesn't paint a full picture, according to Patrick Crakes, a former senior vice president at Fox Sports who now runs his own media consulting firm.
'The NBA Finals is a national event. It's better to have a base from big-market teams, from a mass of viewing, but the whole ecosystem is much more complicated than that,' Crakes said.
Think of a television distribution deal as an ecosystem serving three key constituencies: The league (the rights seller), the carriers (Turner Sports, ESPN, etc.) and the distributors (Comcast, DirecTV, YouTube TV, etc.). Those constituencies are concerned with their own self-interests, yes, but in many cases, those interests overlap or align.
These deals are also negotiated as large packages, with inventory (games) from the regular and postseasons all bundled together. ESPN/ABC did not secure the rights solely to these Finals. The money culled from the Finals is just a portion of the overall measure of the commercial success of the deal in a fiscal year.
Per Crakes, advertising often constitutes approximately 20-30% of the overall financial pie, a meaningful number but not a decisive one. And much of that income that's attached to the playoffs is derived not from the showpiece Finals, but from the early rounds, where TV partners broadcast the largest sheer quantity of games. Yes, bigger markets in later rounds makes a difference, but sometimes not as much of one as a busy, engaging start to the postseason.
Good, long series in rounds one and two will fill the advertising-dollars bucket long before the Finals. Short, uncompelling sweeps can leave a hole no big-city viewership or last-minute dramatics will fill.
'Postseason economics, a lot of it gets determined by the first couple rounds. That's where all the inventory is,' Crakes said.
There are also headwinds untethered to a market share, or an individual sport's popularity.
The rapidly fragmenting viewer ecosystem has prompted small dips in ratings for even America's most popular sports.
Consumers no longer need easier-to-quantify access points to live sports like traditional carriers (Comcast, DirecTV, and so forth), with cord cutters eating into wider TV share. More fans come to games via social media, be it through highlights, real-time updates or other links back to the games themselves.
There is an extent to which these Finals will be impacted by shifting viewer habits no matter the markets involved, whether it's No. 1 New York, No. 25 Indianapolis or No. 47 Oklahoma City (per SportsMediaWatch).
Which circles back to one of Crakes' basic points: The Finals can also appeal across a wider base irrespective of market size.
'If you think about a total package of how NBA rights work,' Crakes said, 'it's important to keep in mind that small-market finals, like what we're about to see, that feature some of the game's best young players, that are going to be around for the next 15 years, being showcased, is not a bad thing for the league.'
Shai Gilgeous-Alexander's star turn this season has included a scoring title, his first-career MVP nod and a center-stage role for the winningest team in the NBA.
There has been perhaps no more compelling individual storyline in these playoffs — certainly in the Eastern Conference — than Pacers star Tyrese Haliburton's ascension into the elite tier of the league's guards.
Around them orbit meaningful subplots (Jalen Williams' remarkable year, Pascal Siakam's impact in Indy, the dynamism presented by Indiana's backcourt depth, Chet Holmgren's continued development).
The sport by nature puts fewer players on the floor, offering a bright spotlight to its stars. And unlike in football or baseball, those stars are often involved in games for long stretches, unfettered by offense-defense swaps or at-bat limits.
In many ways it's easier to sell stars in the NBA, so long as they deliver their best. Whether the uniforms they wear say New York, Indiana or OKC, compelling performances from those players will go a long way toward determining the commercial success of the series upcoming.
'This is the league's future here,' Crakes said. 'The Thunder are fantastic. If the Pacers give them a series, my guess is everybody gets interested, even in New York and L.A., and it carries along just fine.'
Which leads into the most fundamental determining factor in this discussion: The series has to entertain.
Crakes worked at Fox Sports in October 2000, when the Yankees and Mets delivered their famed 'Subway Series." Top to bottom, the company was energized by the prospect of capturing a compelling championship dominating the country's biggest market.
Instead, despite the fact that every game was decided by one or two runs, national interest never materialized. The favored Yankees eased to a 4-1 series win in front of a national audience that delivered what was at that time the lowest-rated World Series in history.
'The thing was a giant dud, because the rest of the America (wasn't interested),' Crakes said. 'You can be the dog that caught the car when you wish for these things.'
Which means, of course, the same can be said in the opposite direction.
Oklahoma City and Indiana have been, across the season's final months, arguably the two best teams in the NBA. Their records since Jan. 1 are first (Thunder) and fourth (Pacers) in the NBA.
The Thunder finished with the league's best record and, while Indiana's path might have been smoothed slightly by Boston's bow-out, by almost any measure the Pacers have been playing championship-level basketball for five months.
If that continues in this series — if Indiana can stand toe-to-toe with Oklahoma City and turn this into a six- or seven-game series — it will drive viewership everywhere. Likewise, an uneventful series decided in five games or fewer wouldn't do well, regardless.
'The real component in how successful something like this is, is a seven-game series,' Crakes said. 'That's where the gold is. Game 6, Game 7, and if we get to that with this series, this Finals will do just fine.'
Of course, there's an extent to which the Finals will own the airwaves anyway.
With football in hibernation, and baseball entering its summer dog days, the NBA Finals are virtually always a ratings winner.
Crakes pointed out there can be long-term benefits for the league in small-market success. The last decade has seen Cleveland, Toronto, Denver and Milwaukee all win the NBA championship, strengthening the league's exposure in those markets and suggesting efforts to even the playing field between big- and small-market teams are paying dividends.
'The system's working. The small-market teams are figuring out ways to compete with the big-market teams,' Crakes said. 'This is an opportunity for these smaller markets to continue to have a deeper relationship with the NBA.'
As with so much in sports, the impact of this series will be determined foremost by what the NBA makes of it. Does Oklahoma City complete a season of dominance? Do the league's two best teams at this time of year deliver a compelling Finals? Does this mark the transcendent moment for one of the NBA's young stars?
All those things can, in the long term, matter as much as raw viewer data. The tendency to compare across years is reflexive. The sport's ownership of the national stage at this point in the annual calendar, though, is undeniable.
'This is going to be a gigantic number,' Crakes said. 'It's going to rate better than anything else, probably anything else at this point in the summer, and the economics are already largely in the bank.'