The NBA’s Gambling Addiction is Destroying The Game
It’s time for an intervention
As much as I love basketball, NBA games have become almost unwatchable unless my favorite team is playing (Go Bucks!). And I’m not alone in feeling that way.
NBA viewership is tanking and every sports commentator has talked about it in recent weeks, but they’re all talking about the wrong thing. Everyone is talking about why they believe viewership is down, but no one is asking why the NBA doesn’t seem to care.
Think about it… If the NBA doesn’t care that viewership is going down, it means they don’t care that you, the viewer, the fan, have lost interest.
And the NBA is a multi-billion dollar business. So, even if they don’t care about the fans out of the goodness of their hearts, you’d at least think they’d care for financial reasons. But they don’t.
And I have a theory about why they don’t care, and it’s the same reason that your favorite sports commentators are focused on why viewership is going down instead of why the NBA doesn’t care.
It’s all about money, and where it’s coming from.
The Real Golden Rule: He Who Has The Gold Makes The Rules
It’s unclear exactly how much the NBA stands to lose from declining viewership, but estimates are in the millions. So if the NBA is a business and declining viewership costs them millions of dollars, why aren’t they panicking? Why don’t they seem that concerned?
The only logical explanation — if making money is their primary concern… and it is — would be that the business is making up for that lost revenue elsewhere. This is the part no one in sports media wants to talk about and may even be contractually obligated not to talk about.
Stick with me.
Could the rise of three-pointers be the main reason for the NBA's viewership problems? Sure.
But you know what else has risen just as fast as the rate of three-pointers shot in the NBA and is constantly being shoved down the throats of NBA fans?
Gambling.
Every NBA game now feels like a giant advertisement for the gambling industry rather than a sporting event you are excited to watch.
Turn on an NBA game (or ESPN, or even — increasingly — your favorite sports YouTuber) and you’11 be met with a constant barrage of gambling commercials and graphics on the court, next to the score, before replays... it’s constant.
Whether you like gambling or not, put feelings aside for a second and acknowledge that if the NBA doesn’t have your best interests at heart and just sees you as a way to make money, gambling companies certainly don’t care about you.
The house always wins if you play, and the house is shelling out many millions of dollars to the NBA, and those who cover it, to get you to play and keep you hooked. Now, feelings aside, ask yourself a few simple questions:
Is it possible that the NBA doesn’t seem concerned about declining viewership if they’re more than making up for those losses through exponential growth in betting on NBA games and lucrative multi-year deals with sports betting companies worth hundreds of millions of dollars every year?
And is it possible that you don’t hear any ESPN commentators, and a growing number of “independent sports commentators,” talking about how sports betting might be factoring into the NBA’s lack of urgency about declining viewership when you realize how much they rake in from contracts and sponsorship deals with sports betting
companies?
Heck, ESPN now has its own gambling platform called ESPNBet.
Or is it more likely that mega-corporations like the NBA, ESPN (owned by Walt Disney), and gambling companies, actually care about you and the game of basketball itself more than making as much money off of you, the
fan, as they possibly can?
Do you really believe that sports commentators are completely altruistic, incorruptible, and would never even consider turning a blind eye to an important story so they can get their bag?
If fans don’t like the state of the NBA and want the NBA to care enough to fix it, the fans need to speak the only language guys like NBA Commissioner Adam Silver — who was the first NBA Commission to advocate for the legalization of gambling on sports — understand: dollars and cents
Think about it.
I have, and here’s my conclusion. The NBA listens to the people who put money in their pockets. And before sports betting (read: gambling) exploded, it was the fans who did that through ticket sales, merchandise, and by watching the game. But now, the NBA’s pockets are lined by gambling companies that take money from the fans, keep a ton of it for themselves, and give a ton to the NBA and those who cover them.
The NBA still gets paid, and the sad irony is that the fans are still paying, but now they’re paying through a ruthless greedy middleman (gambling companies), and are paying for an inferior product.
But the NBA doesn’t care because it’s a lot easier and more lucrative to ignore you, the fans, and make changes to the game to get you to watch more often if they’re still getting your money and only have to deal with a couple of companies instead of millions of disgruntled fans.
But all is not lost.
The fans still have the power, because they still have the money. The question really is whether or not the fans care enough to break the cycle and the NBA’s gambling addiction.
Thanks for reading my story.
