NBA

Last August, Roberts was named ESPN’s senior vice president for NBA and studio production. As the league comes out of the All-Star break and the push toward the playoffs intensifies, Roberts says he is pleased with the early results. Game viewership on ESPN is up 10%, and the new NBA Today studio show has seen a 35% increase.

Sinclair Broadcast Group‘s regional sports network unit Diamond Sports Group has signed a new deal with the National Basketball Association that gives its Bally Sports networks permission to offer streaming content including live games on an authenticated and direct-to-consumer basis.
The deal covers 16 NBA teams in their local territories.

By all measures, sports advertising is dominating ads in all other types of programming, walloping the competition in primetime. All indications are it only has more to grow.

In 2020, the NBA and the NHL were the most assertive major American sports leagues in their efforts to contain the impact of COVID on their seasons. Both leagues employed “bubbles” that sequestered players and employed aggressive testing regimens to continue their seasons. About a year-and-a-half later, their paths have diverged. On Tuesday, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver said the league has “no plans” to halt games, despite the lightning-quick spread of the Omicon variant.

National Basketball Association broadcasting legend Marv Albert signed off for the final time on July 4, his final words a simple “good night” to his legion of fans. Albert, whose 55-year-career was punctuated by his trademark “Yes!” call when someone made a crucial jump shot, finished his career with TNT, as the Milwaukee Bucks defeated the Atlanta Hawks in Game 6 of the Eastern Conference Finals.

After making it through the three-month Orlando bubble without a single case of COVID-19, the NBA couldn’t make it through two days of its out-of-the-bubble 2020-21 season before the virus wreaked havoc. The league announced that Wednesday’s game between the Houston Rockets and Oklahoma City Thunder has been postponed due to health and safety protocols.

The NBA’s board of governors and players’ association will hold separate meetings on Thursday expected to culminate with an agreement on starting the 2020-21 season on Dec. 22 and playing a reduced 72-game schedule, sources tell ESPN.

New remote production techniques, distributed workflows and onsite safety protocols have dramatically reshaped sports production. As COVID-19 continues to be a threat, sports producers can expect less travel, trucks staying in place and a slowdown of UHD production until the crisis abates.

Post- and end-of-the-season action for TV sports franchises has seen sharply lower overall viewership as a result of sports competition caused by disruptions in scheduling due to COVID-19, as well as lower persons using television (PUT) data. MoffettNathanson Research says the returning NBA and NHL have been impacted by lower PUT data in August and September versus the April and May periods — the former period being one that traditionally sees lower PUT data.

In a joint statement released Friday, the league and the players association said they would immediately establish a social justice coalition, made up of players, coaches and owners, that would focus on issues such as voting access and advocating for meaningful police and criminal justice reform.

The National Basketball Association and the National Basketball Players Association announced today that they have finalized a comprehensive plan for a July 30 restart to the 2019-20 season, which includes stringent health and safety protocols, a single-site campus at Walt Disney World Resort in Florida and the goal of taking collective action to combat systemic […]

NBA owners on Thursday overwhelmingly approved the league’s plan to restart the season with 22 teams at Walt Disney World in Florida in July, according to a person familiar with the voting results. The plan will next be reviewed by the National Basketball Players Association, which has scheduled a virtual meeting with its membership Friday afternoon.

The NBA’s board of governors intends to approve a league proposal on a 22-team format to restart the season in Orlando, Florida, sources told ESPN. The conference call and vote is set for 12:30 p.m. ET on Thursday, sources said.

The National Basketball Association is having what it terms “exploratory conversations” with the Walt Disney Co. about resuming its postponed season. The league issued a statement Saturday on its Twitter account. If the talks bear fruit, the season would resume in late July at Disney’s ESPN complex in Orlando, Fla., as a “single site for an NBA campus for games, practices, and housing,” the statement said.

The NBA has suspended games indefinitely after a player on the Utah Jazz tested positive for the coronavirus, the league announced Wednesday night.

Ratings may be down for the NBA this season, but ad sales for the league’s All-Star Game remain strong. According to Jon Diament, executive VP and chief revenue officer at Turner Sports, commercials for this year’s All-Star Weekend in Chicago sold out faster than ever before at prices that were “significantly higher” than in past years.

The NBA was lagging behind the NFL and Major League Baseball in both revenue and television profile when Stern took over in 1984. But by the time he stepped down in 2014 he had overseen the league’s growth from fears of extinction in the late 1970s to a $5 billion enterprise. TV revenue increased more than 40-fold in that span, crossing the $1 billion threshold. He was 77. Above, Stern is flanked by Hakeem Olajuwon, right, the No. 1 pick overall by the Houston Rockets, and Sam Bowie, the No. 2 pick overall by the Portland Trail Blazers, at the NBA Draft in 1984. (AP photo: Marty Lederhandler)

Despite a scoring boom and an abundance of magnetic personalities such as Antetokounmpo and James, NBA ratings on ESPN and TNT, through mid-December, were down more than 15% compared with last year. That sharp dip has exacerbated one of the toughest stretches recently for the league, which has been rocked by high-profile injuries, the Hong Kong controversy and former commissioner David Stern’s brain hemorrhage.

The NBA is throwing up bricks in national TV ratings over the first quarter of the regular season. A combination of big stars being absent from national telecasts, a marquee team mostly missing from the league’s two biggest broadcast partners and the fall of a recent dynasty have all factored into the drop. But there’s still time for the league to find its touch.

Less than three weeks into the season, the league’s television partners are still trying to assess the fallout from injuries to the Golden State Warriors.

Katie Nolan, analyst Jay Williams, Snapchat SportsCenter host Gary Striewski and Mike Korzemba, a YouTube influencer who specializes in basketball-related content, will hold forth on a special Game 2 broadcast available only on the ESPN App. ESPN is taking a swing at what is likely to be a growing challenge for sports purveyors of all sizes: A rising generation of viewers is growing accustomed to watching their games in a very different way.

As the NBA post-season action gets underway, strong demand has already gobbled up between 85% and 95% of the inventory on ESPN, ABC and Turner’s TNT with percentage rate increases over last year in the high single digits, according to time buyers and sellers.

The Lakers’ 123-113 victory Wednesday night in Las Vegas was watched by 1.98 million viewers, ESPN said Thursday. A spokesman says that is the most viewers for an NBA preseason game on any network since at least 1994, which is as far back as the records go.