Every year, the NBA plays some of its most anticipated regular season games on Christmas Day. The day is annually jam-packed with marquee matchups featuring the game’s biggest superstars, classic rivalries and championship previews.
For many fans, the NBA season doesn’t really start until Christmas.
In 2020, due to a shifted schedule as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, it is starting to look like the NBA will not be starting until Christmas time. The Athletic’s Shams Charania reported the league is targeting a start date for the 2020-21 season of Dec. 22, including a 72-game schedule as opposed to the typical 82-game season, in order to finish before the Summer Olympics in Tokyo.
The late December start makes a lot of sense for the NBA in 2020. Charania reported the league could lose more than $500 million in revenue by starting later than the target date. With the NBA Finals ending in mid-October, the league can only afford to give players so much of a break.
While the start time certainly is a good fit for this year, the NBA should make the change permanent.
The biggest reason for this is the NFL. From September through the first week of February, the NFL dominates American television. In 2019, four of the five most watched television programs were NFL games, all of which took place during the NBA season.
In comparison, the most-viewed NBA game of 2020, Game 6 of the 2019 NBA Finals between the Raptors and Warriors, was the 22nd most-watched program of the year, behind 12 NFL games. By delaying the start of the season by two months, the NBA would be competing with the NFL for two fewer months, only overlapping their seasons by a few weeks instead of a few months.
If the NBA wants to draw more fans to watch games, it needs to understand trying to compete with the NFL for viewers is a losing battle.
The NFL rarely plays games on Christmas Day, as is the case for major college football and college basketball, which would give the NBA an opening day essentially to itself.
The NBA also needs to understand fans want to watch marquee matchups with the game’s brightest stars in prime time. On Christmas, a day off for most people, fans can tune in to games all day long, as they have for years. If the NBA wants to start its season on or around Christmas, the matchups need to be perfect, drawing in fans not just for the day, but for the whole season.
Matchups could include playoffs and Finals previews, all-star battles and games across the country. The league could potentially feature more than the typical five Christmas Day games to draw fans in media markets across the nation. The NBA needs to go all-out for the holiday if it wants to draw in viewers at the new start to the season.
Additionally, a later start means the playoffs last well into the summer, when the only other of the major American sports playing is baseball, in the dog days of its 162-game regular season. The NBA could dominate the headlines for the whole summer with most of its playoffs not having to compete with other major sporting events.
With a Christmas start looking more and more likely, there is a chance this could become the new normal for the league, setting up a new explosion of success in the American media market.
