Pigs get fat. Hogs get slaughtered. And the NBA gets massacred.
For the second straight Christmas Day, the NFL and NBA had games on TV at the same time. And the NBA’s ratings cratered in Year Two.
Via SportsMediaWatch.com, the available numbers show a significant drop in NBA viewership from 2022 to 2023.
Celtics-Lakers drew 5 million toward viewers. That was an 18-percent drop from last year’s Bucks-Celtics game, which had an audience of 6.08 million in the same window.
Bucks-Knicks had 2.49 million, down 39 percent from Sixers-Knicks in the same window a year earlier. Mavericks-Suns had 1.37 million, a 42 percent drop from Suns-Nuggets. Sixers-Heat attracted 1.3 million, a 73-percent drop from Grizzlies-Warriors.
The ratings for Warriors-Nuggets were not yet available. That’s the NBA’s last remaining hope to reverse a trend that has made the NFL the top draw, by far, on Christmas.
On Monday, 31 million watched Raiders-Chiefs, 29 million watched Giants-Eagles, and 27.6 million watched Ravens-49ers.
The NFL has said it won’t stage games next year on Christmas, when it falls on a Wednesday. Why, however, would the NFL ever surrender the territory that it was so quickly captured on a day that, like Thanksgiving, features a captive audience with few options.