Bubble Kings: Lakers run past Heat for 17th NBA championship

I am going to say today was the best day for me in this lousy 2020. I have waited for 10 years for the trophy to come back home and we had our share of bad years over that time. I hope we can get AD signed this offseason and get even stronger for next season. This is for you Mamba!

King James, what can you say? Congratulations to the Lakers!

Congrats to the LeBron James and the Lakers! You won it for Kobe's legacy!

@ ETHAN1001 + KORE NANI - Seems a lot of people who say they don't care are posting about it. That unfit pseudocelebrity president and his minions at Fox News are always injecting politics into sports but I'm sure it is OK with you. Oh, and one more thing - audiences don't pay players so I doubt they really care whether you or Billy Bob are watching or not.

Ethan, keep politics out of a woman womb, I missed the last two games, because I felt bad, the Lakers were in clear command in game 6

By the stroke of luck however, the Lakers didn't go thru the other top 2 contenders for the title (Bucks, Clippers

They were good teams but the Bucks and Clippers were not truly top contenders and it showed because they didn't even make it to their respective conference finals. Giannis needs a better supporting cast and the Clippers need play more cohesively and be more clutch but neither were going to beat the Lakers anyway. Congrats L.A.

Congrats. For a coincidence, LeBron won his 4th championship in the same city where the late great Kobe Bryant also won his 4th championship - Orlando, Florida

By the stroke of luck however, the Lakers didn't go thru the other top 2 contenders for the title (Bucks, Clippers)

Keep Politics Out Of Sport! No one wants to hear Marxist propaganda!

"Trump calls on Big Ten Conference to play fall football"

https://news.yahoo.com/trump-calls-big-ten-conference-170310143.html

I stated 50%. My mistake, TV figures shows the NBA has lost 70% of its audience compared to last year. Now the players can have a 70% wage cut or Keep Politics Out Of Sport. Go Woke, Go Broke!

ALL sports ratings are down due to Covid-19 restrictions

"Sports Ratings Have Tanked Across the Board While Cable News Thrives"

https://www.si.com/extra-mustard/2020/10/14/sports-cable-news-ratings-2020

A lot has been written about ratings for the NFL and NBA. The NBA is coming off record lows for the Finals, while the NFL's numbers are down a little bit across the board.

Everyone is twisting themselves into a pretzel to explain the lower numbers when it comes to these two leagues because they are the most popular in this country. But the truth is that almost every league has faced plummeting ratings. In many cases, leagues have experienced record lows over the past few months.

The one exception has been the WNBA. According to ESPN, its coverage of the Seattle Storm’s championship-clinching win in Game 3 of the Finals was up 34% year-over-year over Game 3 of the 2019 WNBA Finals and up 27% over the Washington Mystics’ Game 5 championship win last year.

The Finals between Seattle and the Las Vegas Aces averaged 440,000 viewers for the three-game series, up 15% over the WNBA Finals.

That's about it for the good news when it comes to sports ratings in 2020. Everything else is a disaster.

Except for the WNBA - a league that had their basketball court decorated:

"WNBA unveils 2020 court, which features two Black Lives Matter signs"

https://sports.yahoo.com/wnba-unveils-2020-court-which-features-two-black-lives-matter-signs-142634533.html

Go ahead and explain that one

I stated 50%. My mistake, TV figures shows the NBA has lost 70% of its audience compared to last year. Now the players can have a 70% wage cut or Keep Politics Out Of Sport. Go Woke, Go Broke!

Btw, it's not 70% - it's down 27% from last season

"Falling TV ratings across most sports? Here are four reasons to explain drop during pandemic"

https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/media/2020/10/08/pandemic-why-tv-ratings-sports-have-been-down-since-returning/5913720002/

After coronavirus halted the NBA’s regular season, the association formatted a bubble template to resume the conclusion of the regular season, playoffs, and finals. By the end of the first round of the playoffs, ratings were reportedly down 27 percent from last season.

Stanley Cup Final: -61% to 13-year low

U.S. Open (golf) final round: -56% to all-time low

Kentucky Derby: -43% to all-time low

Indy 500: -32% to all-time low

All of them May and June events moved to August and September.

The U.S. Open tennis tournament viewership fell sharply on ESPN, down 45% from the year before. The French Open is down 57% so far on NBC.

In other words, the pattern is clear. And it should lead us to examine what’s really going on. 

There are four factors contributing to that.

(1) There’s a certain level of cannibalization on the calendar. [The delays caused by Covid-19 have condensed the sports calendar, so now sports are all competing against each other at the same time, when before they're separated into their own seasons. People can't watch everything, so they have to pick and choose which to spend their hours in a day - leaving many sports unwatched.]

(2) It’s not part of our natural cycle to be watching sports on weekday afternoons or NBA Finals games in October or Triple Crown races on a college football Saturday. “We get used to watching certain things or having particular sports be part of our lives at certain times of the year,” said Dennis Deninger, a former ESPN production executive, who is now a professor in sports communications at Syracuse University’s Falk College of Sport and Human Dynamics. “If you move sports from their natural positions to places that they’re unfamiliar, they’re competing with sports that are traditionally seen in those time periods and everyone suffers a little bit.”

(3) Lack of fans in the stands is a psychological cue that these games don’t mean as much. “The crowd going crazy is part of the allure of watching sports on TV,” Karp said. “Crowd goes wild is an expression for a reason.”

(4) There’s a presidential election going on in a highly charged political climate, which echoes some of the data Karp saw from 2016 when some news and commentary shows were up 30%. “Viewership in cable news networks is up significantly, and right now, especially once the president got COVID, that’s all anyone was watching,” Karp said. "It affected college football numbers (last weekend). It affected everything.”

I stated 50%. My mistake, TV figures shows the NBA has lost 70% of its audience compared to last year. Now the players can have a 70% wage cut or Keep Politics Out Of Sport. Go Woke, Go Broke!

Well done for losing 50% of your American audience. No one cares. KPOOS, Keep Politics Out Of Sport! No one wants to hear Marxist propaganda!