Professional sports leagues are pushing away fans because of politics.
A recent Morning Consult poll showed that sports leagues’ favorability among Republicans has plummeted.
And LeBron James’s anti-American protest is coming back to haunt the NBA.
The NBA’s favorability with Republican voters has tumbled to -5, and it’s showing in the ratings.
The league’s full embrace of the radical Black Lives Matter movement during the playoffs alienated many fans, and the trend has not reversed.
LeBron James as the face of the league has played a big part in the politicization of the NBA.
Last year, he made the sickening statement that black men were being “hunted” in America.
This season, the ratings are as bad as ever.
From Breitbart:
“The NBA has suffered another ratings disaster, with ABC falling 45 percent since the 2011-12 season, while TNT was down 40 percent, and ESPN was off 20 percent…The past two NBA finals each have fallen one over the other, with last year’s down 51 percent to an all-time low for the championships. The worst was the final game, off nearly 70 percent year-over-year.”
Some have argued that star players sitting out when healthy enough to play due to “load management” is the cause of the ratings drop.
While that definitely plays a role, the NBA’s problem runs deeper than that.
More from Breitbart:
“The NBA’s collapse may not be surprising in light of recent polls finding that basketball fans feel that the league has become far too wrapped up in politics. In September, a Harris poll found that 39 percent of respondents who identified as sports fans felt that the NBA had become too political, and 19 percent said that they had turned off pro basketball because of the NBA’s deep links to China. In 2020, the NBA’s coronavirus season in the bubble launched with heavy-handed paeans to the anti-American Black Lives Matter agenda.”
The alignment with BLM was a huge miscalculation, and NBA commissioner Adam Silver said the league would veer away from that in the future.
Silver remarked:
“My sense is there’ll be somewhat a return to normalcy, that those messages will largely be left to be delivered off the floor. And, I understand those people who are saying, ‘I’m on your side, but I want to watch a basketball game.’”
James and other NBA stars not only attacked America, but they defended China despite their human rights abuses because of financial ties with Nike.
The NBA can’t afford to disrupt the vast Chinese market, and neither can Nike.
James and outspoken coach Steve Kerr went out of their way to avoid criticism of the Chinese Communist Party.
James chastised former Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey for expressing support for pro-freedom protests in Hong Kong, and Kerr deflected a question about CCP abuses and pointed out America’s gun violence.
If the NBA and its main stars continue to get political, then the ratings problem will persist.
