The swan song is drawing near for the NBA’s glorious king, 40-year-old Los Angeles Lakers forward LeBron James, leaving the association with an uncertain future. James, alongside Phoenix Suns forward Kevin Durant and Golden State Warriors guard Steph Curry, led the NBA to an unprecedented media rights deal earlier this year — yet despite this, the NBA is in a ratings crisis. National game ratings are down 25%, and as James’ retirement approaches, the NBA is unable to find a star to pick up the mantle. The NBA needs someone to take Lebron’s place on the throne in order to save the fledgling sport.
This isn’t the first time a major sport has struggled with ratings. MLB faced its own crisis half a decade ago. When the average age of its fans increased and the league struggled to market its star players, MLB’s situation in the late 2010s mirrored today's NBA. The NBA should follow MLB’s lead by making changes to improve gameplay and centering a new star as the face of the league.
MLB bounces back after pandemic
After the COVID-19 pandemic, MLB saw record lows in attendance and viewership. As a last-ditch effort to avoid the fate of boxing or horse racing — going from a can’t-miss event to a niche sport — MLB instituted rule changes throughout the early 2020s. These changes consisted of decreasing overall game time, increasing pace-of-play and creating rules that incentivized exciting gameplay.
Many older fans begrudged changes such as a pitch-clock, banning the shift, ghost runners in extra innings and bigger bases. However, changes such as a three-batter minimum for pitchers, decreased time in between innings and a cap on the amount of mound visits per game were nearly universally applauded.
As a result, fans per game increased by 2,500, with a total of over six million more total fans attending games in 2023. Attendance continued to increase this past season as well. On top of the millions more people attending ball games each year, MLB saw a rise in average viewership among all weekly nationally televised games, as well as an increase in viewers overseas in Japan and Korea.
The rule changes were not the only reason for this success, though. Seven seasons ago, Shohei Ohtani, a Japanese-born player with out-of-this-world talent, made the transition to MLB from the Japanese Nippon Professional Baseball League. Ohtani was the first player in over 100 years to take the mound every five days as a pitcher and start as his team’s designated hitter. Last offseason, Ohtani signed a $700 million deal to join one of MLB’s biggest teams, the Los Angeles Dodgers.
Having such a superstar join a big team was a blessing for MLB — and the league took full advantage. For the first time ever, MLB marketed a foreign-born superstar as its most popular player, posting Ohtani regularly on Instagram and counting down batters until he batted in the World Series. The two-way superstar became must-see TV in 2024, when he made it to the playoffs for the first time in his career. Ohtani is a television draw, unlike any player since perhaps Barry Bonds of the San Francisco Giants.
MLB is not yet satisfied, though. The league continues to look into improving gameplay by instituting possible robot umpires and rules that would incentivize traditional starting pitching. This continuous improvement brought MLB a precipitous increase in ratings and attendance over the past few years, reversing the trend of what some called a “dying sport” in the early 2020s.
The NBA should follow MLB’s lead
The NBA has a lot to gain from examining MLB’s position from a few years ago.
If you ask almost any NBA fan what they think of the current state of the game, they will say that games consist of too many three-point attempts and that every team plays the same.
Currently, three-point shooting is so efficient that the average team attempts 37.6 threes per game. In the 2014-15 season, the year that Curry won his first MVP by revolutionizing three-point shooting, teams averaged 22.4 threes attempted per game — with Curry’s Warriors averaging 27 threes attempted per game. Conversely, the Boston Celtics, who lead the league in threes attempted per game, average 49 threes per game through 43 games this season.
If you turn on any NBA game this year, you will see that critics of this style of play are justified. Teams play an NBA2K brand of basketball, driving to the rim for an easy layup or kicking out to take a three-pointer. Gone are the days of distinct basketball styles — the math shows that to score points most efficiently, you must be right under the basket or taking a three.
Despite these issues, teams can not be expected to put themselves at a disadvantage to make the game more appealing for fans. This puts NBA Commissioner Adam Silver in the same predicament MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred faced years ago. In order to address sinking ratings, changes to gameplay rules must be implemented in the NBA.
Like banning the shift in MLB, moving the three-point line further away from the basket may be met with initial dismay but will eventually improve the game. This is because as the difficulty of the three-pointer increases, the three-point percentage will decrease, making the shot less valuable.
Secondly, like MLB with Ohtani, the NBA was blessed with an absolute freak of nature in 7-foot-4 Victor Wembanyama. The second-year French center has the skills of a point guard and can make three-pointers at an efficient rate, and he is one of the tallest players in the NBA this year.
While NBA historian Bill Simmons claims that it is impossible for the NBA to succeed with a foreign-born player such as Wembanyama as the face of the league, he is wrong. To back his claim, Simmons points to current superstars such as Denver Nuggets Center Nikola Jokic or Milwaukee Bucks forward Giannis Antetokounmpo, who despite winning MVPs never became the face of the association. Yet these are not fair comparisons; Antetokounmpo's best years came when James, Durant and Curry still dominated the league, and Jokic is more interested in spending time with his horses in Serbia than playing basketball.
Wembanyama is coming up at a time when there is no clear best player in the world, and his skill set, like Ohtani’s, has never been seen before. If marketed correctly, the NBA could solve its star player problem and have its next glorious king.
