America has now gotten all the Cleveland Cavaliers-Oklahoma City Thunder basketball we will be allowed before June, which is both not enough and more than enough to say with some confidence that these are the two most compelling teams in the National Basketball Thing by a healthy margin. Their two games were stay-in-your-chair fascinating, even Thursday night's blowout 'Der win, which followed a game eight days earlier in which the Cavs out-delivered OKC. A case can be made that their matchup is the only one that can save a season of ratings regret and regression, and it raises the same questions that were being asked a decade ago:
Can the NBA thrive with a championship series with two non-marquee teams? More to the point, a bunch of non-marquee players? And finally, why does that matter?
If this is just a basketball matter, the answer is obvious. The two teams with the best records will always have something ambiently epic about them, and these are two teams on pace to win 70 games, which would by this sub-fundamental statistic make them the third and fourth most successful teams in history. The match sells itself, in short, if not necessarily in the way that TV executives might choose—the best offensive team faces the best defensive team in a clash of opposing styles. For nerdly basketball fans—Duncanites, for lack of a better term—Cavs-Thunder is either the only or the best acceptable choice.
But by the standard of marquee brands for casual fans, neither of these world-beaters are perceived to be needle movers, and for some reason this has become the overarching argument of the season—why America seems to be down on the game. No league worships its royalty more than the NBA, and that royalty is still Lakers/Celtics/Knicks, even when the teams themselves don’t oblige. The Lakers and Celtics have been elite for the largest part of the league's almost 80 years, and the Knicks are in New York. The Larry Bird vs. Magic Johnson era is still considered the high point in league history, followed closely by Michael Jordan vs. Nobody/Everybody, and then . . .
. . . well, that would be the LeBron James-Stephen Curry Era, which is entering its final approach after a full decade as the dominant triple-zero in the sport. James is the logical inheritor of Wilt Chamberlain's throne as the most dominant single player in the league, and Curry changed the essential dynamic of the sport by redefining the definition of a high-percentage shot. They defined an entire decade and beyond for different reasons, even overcoming the brand-shaming of two franchises that had historically been so far from the Cool Kids Table that they were in another dining room altogether.
And now Cleveland is back, albeit without the scene-stealing James, and the Warriors are trolling the play-in line as Curry learns the limits of being merely the best long-distance shooter of all time. The problem is obvious—how does the league sell media markets 19 and 47 to the rest of the country without historical outliers on either roster?
None of this would matter in the slightest if the people fretting so aggressively about the NBA's ratings drop were also watching and enjoying the (very good) basketball being played in those games. Even though ratings have always been more or less guesses for advertisers trying to figure out how badly they wanted to give the league money, and despite the fact that the traditional TV model is rapidly being rendered obsolete, the NBA is still expected to uproot its own modes of work to address this alleged loss in popularity. If Americans give in to their inner grandfathers and reduce their attention spans to the two footballs, it will always somehow be discussed as if it were the NBA’s fault. Load management! Too many threes! Jimmy Butler! The Washington Wizards! How much self-sabotage can a sport take?
Against this mid-apocalypse tableau, the NBA is giving you . . . yes, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Donovan Mitchell. Putting Thunder-Cavs in this room-for-two box is deeply reductive, admittedly, because the teams are exceptional even after you winnow out the wasteland of the league’s bottom third. And for what it’s worth, the true believers are already in the building. Casual fans are the ones that drive ratings from tepid to sponsor-attracting, which means the central issue isn't “are the cities big enough for national attention” but “are the casual fans properly prepped for a post-LeSteph era.” If the challenge was just about getting people to watch good teams play against each other, it would be one thing. (And, at least for last week’s Thunder/Cavs match-up, a lot of people did.) But this isn’t quite that.
It isn’t really new, either. The league’s ratings dipped for a while after Bird and Magic left the game, and again after Jordan stopped collecting rings; the true answer for Adam Silver is to view the current moment not as the end of the road but the natural end of a cycle that will be replaced by another in due time. And if he's wrong, well, what's he going to do, stop broadcasting the games? Move every franchise to New York? Get Luguentz Dort a three-movie deal?
The most basic question, though, remains this: Why is this your problem? The bleatings of insiders aside, you should only care about the NBA's ratings in your house. Jimmy Dolan's bottom line should be of no concern to you, now or ever. If you're down for Thunder-Cavs, you should do Thunder-Cavs. If not, nobody's taking attendance except Adam Silver, and you're not hanging out with him. Maybe magic rises from this still-hypothetical Finals, or maybe it goes over with the general public like a dead cod and there are two new teams next year; hell, maybe basketball itself dies like TikTok. At this horrifying point in American history, all outcomes are conceivable, including the inconceivable. In three years we can all wax nostalgic about the glorious days of Cavs-Thunder while we argue about whether America is ready for Hornets-Pelicans.
