The NBA made the ridiculous decision to get fully political.
As the face of the league, LeBron James drove the political movement right off a cliff.
Now James’s anti-Trump protest was dealt this humiliating defeat.
LeBron James steered the NBA into murky territory by getting overtly political.
He campaigned for Hillary Clinton in his native Ohio to no effect; Hillary lost the state by nearly ten points.
James has continuously bad-mouthed Donald Trump, and once called him a “bum.”
The NBA also decided to go full bore with the “woke” movement after the tragic death of George Floyd.
The league plastered “Black Lives Matter” on the court even though the organization is openly Marxist, and players wore jerseys with meaningless slogans like “group economics” on the back.
The results have been a resounding failure for the NBA; the decisive game six of the NBA Finals between James’s Los Angeles Lakers and the Miami Heat got beaten in the ratings by a random Sunday Night Football game between the Seattle Seahawks and Minnesota Vikings.
Game six only drew 6.03 million viewers, approximately half of the 12.01 million viewers who tuned in for the Seahawks-Vikings game.
To get a broader idea of just how abysmal those numbers are, last year’s game six between the Golden State Warriors and the Toronto Raptors, a team with a very limited American fanbase, drew 18.34 million viewers.
That represents a near 70% drop from last year, which is devastating from a business perspective.
There are some mitigating factors for the numbers being so atrocious—fall sports competition, no energetic crowds, interest in the 2020 election—but none of those explain such a drastic decline in popularity.
Surveys have shown that the league becoming so political was the deciding factor for many fans who have tuned out.
Perhaps the height of absurdity happened when the Milwaukee Bucks boycotted a playoff game after alleged rapist Jacob Blake was shot by the cops after resisting arrest.
The entire playoffs shut down for a few days, and NBA analyst Kenny Smith literally walked off a live set in solidarity with the players.
Even teams in other sports leagues shut down activities because of Blake’s shooting.
This is the type of hysteria that’s being created by the Left and perpetuated by useful idiots like LeBron James and Hollywood celebrities.
People are sick of it.
That’s why Fox News’s primetime hosts routinely defeated the NBA in the ratings game.
Meanwhile, James and other NBA players are mum on human rights abuses that are ongoing in China.
African immigrants in China have been kicked out of hotels and banned from entering McDonald’s restaurants, pro-freedom protesters have been tamped down in Hong Kong, and the Uyghur Muslims have been loaded onto trains headed to concentration camps.
But James, the NBA, and Nike have too much money invested in China, so they get a pass.
However, James has no problem telling the American people how bad the Orange Man is because he and other leftists take American freedom for granted.
