Social media has a plan to save the NBA Finals

The NBA refuses to listen.

Jun 12, 2025 - 00:38

Social media has a plan to save the NBA Finals

Despite experiencing a brilliant playoff tournament featuring competitive matchups and star players, NBA fans feel like the Finals have been lackluster.

All year, NBA fans are promised that the game intensifies once the playoffs come around. And this year, the teams did not disappoint.

While the Oklahoma City Thunder has been one of the best teams in the league all season, its championship opponent, the Indiana Pacers, is a true Cinderella team that no one expected to get this far in the tournament.

However, while the postseason has been entertaining, fans on social media have not been quiet about how disappointing ESPN and ABC's broadcast of the NBA Finals has been.

Viewers are letting their feelings show through the ratings.

The TV audience for the 2025 NBA Finals has shrunk over the series' first two games.

About 8.9 million people watched Indiana's Tyrese Haliburton beat Oklahoma City at the buzzer. That number fell to 8.76 million in the following, less competitive game 2.

More concerning is the 24% year-over-year drop in viewership from the first two games. The Boston Celtics and Dallas Mavericks, who play in much bigger markets, average 11.65 million viewers during their championship series.

The game 1 viewership is the smallest on record for the Finals' normal window (excluding the Covid bubble playoffs). Meanwhile, game 2 was seen by the league's smallest Finals audience since 2007.

Fans hate the NBA Finals broadcast presentation

It was the end of an era when the NBA officially moved from NBC to ESPN.

The NBA's Sunday broadcasts on NBC introduced the world to legends like Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, Michael Jordan, and Charles Barkley.

But once the NBA moved to ESPN for the 2002-03 season, everything changed.

Gone was the iconic Roundball Rock opening theme. By 2007, so too was the iconic broadcasting duo of Steve "Snapper" Jones and Bill Walton.

While the ESPN NBA broadcasts have had their ups and downs over the years, NBA fans seem to have reached their breaking point with this year's Finals presentation.

In 1986, the league started using on-court decals featuring script and a stylized NBA Finals logo for the championship round.

In 2005, the league took it further and added a giant Larry O’Brien trophy to the mix. That has also since been abandoned, leading to a loss of pageantry that used to define the NBA Finals.

Fans are not happy.

“It’s the NBA Finals and the NBA didn’t even show the National Anthem, Pre-Game intros, no logo on court or jerseys. These are little things but they’re so important for the experience,“ user @OhhMar24 said on X.

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Another fan posted a video of the introduction ceremony from the 2007 finals, lamenting the loss of production value in this year's series.

“For reasons unknown to anybody, The NBA successfully ruined the 'big game' feel of the Finals — removed finals logo at center court [and] got rid of airing the starting lineups on tv. The ‘07 Celtics finals starting lineup intros still gives me goosebumps,“ said X user @JM1849.

The criticism got so bad on social media that the league finally decided to add two digital decals to the broadcast at the last minute. The results were shockingly bad.

X user @MikeBeauvais added a bit of sarcasm, saying, "Here are the terribly low-res digital Larry O’Brien Trophies superimposed on the court like you wanted. They’re glitchy and disappear if we cut back to them too quickly."

ESPN and the NBA reach a crossroads

Along with Warner Bros. Discovery, ESPN has been the NBA's most significant national broadcasting partner for over two decades.

While the relationship will remain strong as the new, 11-year $76 million media rights deal between the two takes effect next season, the pair is no longer in an exclusive relationship.

The NBA Finals have been broadcast exclusively by ESPN and ABC since the 2002-03 season. However, next year, NBC's new contract with the NBA also starts, and ABC/ESPN Finals exclusivity ends.

Next season, the NBA Finals will be broadcast on a channel not owned by ABC for the first time in nearly 25 years, and NBC is pulling out all the stops to ensure fans don't complain about their production like they do about the ESPN Finals.

Last year, NBCUniversal announced a blockbuster 11-year deal for the NBA's broadcast rights. Comcast will pay the NBA about $2.5 billion annually for the right to broadcast games and create content around them.

Michael Jordan, the first-ballot NBA Hall of Famer and universally recognized greatest player of all time, will join NBC Sports' coverage of the NBA as a special contributor when the new season kicks off in October.

NBC also announced that it is bringing Roundball Rock back to the broadcasts, hopefully restoring some of the aura current fans claim the NBA is missing.