Speaker 1
And it's going to be good for viewers because you're just making the regular season a little bit more exciting. And this is a problem that the NBA has dealt with for a long period of time. If you really think about the NBA, it's a long season. It is an absolute grind. You play from October to April. Each team plays 82 games. Players take 50 to 100 flights per year, depending on their schedule. And teams are flying 40,000 miles during the season while playing three games per week. It's an absolute grind. And it's one of the reasons why we've seen load management or rest or shortness or whatever you want to talk about pop up over the last few years. Players like LeBron, KD, Curry, Quai, Kyrie Irving, all these guys are missing 10 to 15 to 20% of the games on a given year because of load management. This obviously sucks for people that are paying to go to the games, but it has also slowly eroded away at the importance of the NBA regular season. Now the playoffs, again, for every sports league average more viewers, but in the NBA, the playoffs average 244% more viewers than your average regular season game. The average regular season game across the NBA, we're talking about on cable television on ESPN on TNT averages 1.59 million viewers. The playoffs, the average game in the playoffs averages 5.47 million viewers. If you want to talk about the NBA finals, you're getting up close to 10 million, maybe a little bit more depending on the game. So the regular season has become significantly less important over the years. And what this does is that it allows the NBA to make the regular season a little bit more important during the middle of the season rather than at the end or at the very beginning. But more importantly, this gives the NBA another valuable asset in media negotiations. The way that I typically explain this to other people is that if you look at the NFL, they have done a better job than anyone that any sports league in the world. I don't care who they've done a better job than anyone with their media rights. The reason for this is not only because they get paid the most, they're making $10 billion a year on their media rights. So that's obviously huge. The NBA is reportedly trying to get a little bit over $8 billion a year. Many people think they might get close to $5 or $6 billion, but still that would be huge. It would be second biggest to the NFL.