Two of the worst days in 80 years of basketball history just happened in one week.
The NBA is not in a good place. Well, that’s an understatement. It’s in a very, very bad place.
Many of the problems bubbling under the surface of the modern NBA seem to be coming to a head in the 2025-2026 season, culminating in the historically embarrassing product now being put out night after night.
Despite just 82 total games in a season spread out over 165-176 days, many star players can’t be bothered to play in all of them. Load management has become a dreaded tradition, to the point where the league has repeatedly tried to cut down on rest days. To avoid more embarrassment from the lax enforcement of the traveling rule, the NBA then added “gathering” to allow for a seemingly ever-increasing number of steps. Then there’s the fact that, for some inexplicable reason, the NBA decided it was a good idea to alienate half the country with overt left-wing politics. It didn’t work.
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Then there’s the other big problem. Tanking. Tanking and lack of effort is an inescapable part of the modern game, and people are noticing. Tim Reynolds on X posted this jaw-dropping stat on Saturday morning: “There have been two days in NBA history, spanning 80 years, where at least nine games were played with an average margin of victory being at least 24 points. Only two such days. In 80 Years. One was (Friday), the other was Sunday.”
And as Clay Travis pointed out in response, this is why the NBA’s new television deals are going to be a disaster for broadcasters.
NBA Commissioner Adam Silver. (Mick Akers/Las Vegas Review-Journal/Tribune News Service via Getty Images)
NBA Is Going To Keep Shrinking And Costing More Money
Travis posted on X in response to these stats that there will be “studies written on the billions of dollars US media companies will use on the NBA TV contract.”
He then compared it to the “Titanic of sports media rights deals.” Not only because the NBA is declining in popularity as right-wing fans have fled, the product disintegrates, and bankable stars age out with few big name replacements, but because other leagues are going to want similar numbers.
Particularly, the most aggressive and ruthless league in the US sports landscape, the NFL.
It’s really a remarkable combination of factors. ESPN, for some reason, decided to invest billions in the NBA. Whether due to political alignment, or a misplaced view of the value of the league’s rights, or some other unknown factor, they gave Adam Silver $76 billion over 11 years for roughly 80 games per year, the NBA Finals, and several other events. Meanwhile, several World Baseball Classic games got similar or better ratings than last year’s NBA Finals. And in doing so, they opened themselves up to the NFL coming back demanding more money. So they’re going to increase their cost to broadcast the most important league in the market, all because they spent a fortune on the least important.
Meanwhile, the league is repaying them by having non-competitive games featuring disinterested players putting in as little effort as possible, if they can even be bothered to play at all. Brilliant.