After a sluggish start to the season, the NBA appears to be heading into the playoffs in fine shape. In doing so, the league can offer lessons to Hollywood in the art of showcasing and commercially leveraging its stars.
Admittedly, pro basketball rode a bit of a roller coaster before this year’s playoffs, which, after play-in games, begin Saturday. Sluggish early ratings prompted fretting from media partners and hand-wringing about the way the game itself is being played, and whether the strategy of taking an abundance of three-point shots had essentially ruined the sport.
Flash forward, though, and a stunning series of midseason trades effectively reshuffled the NBA’s deck, teaming up high-profile stars old and new, while bringing sizzle to the action and creating soap-opera-worthy storylines to help fuel media attention and fan interest, potentially right up until a champion gets crowned.
The positive indicators can be traced to a variety of factors, including the effective pairing of stars, the league’s international flavor and a significant reloading in terms of establishing younger players with marquee appeal — all things that help boost attendance and ratings, and all areas that parallel challenges facing Hollywood.
“We recognize that we are on the precipice of a changing of the guards in the NBA, which means it’s extremely important to tell stories about our young players and elevating those stories to the platforms where our young fan base are,” Gregg Winik, NBA president, content and executive producer, told TheWrap via email.
Perhaps foremost, at a time when movie studios sometimes look to be a bit lost in capitalizing on A-list talent — and have fretted that stars don’t bring people out to theaters the way they once did — the NBA has developed high-profile personalities that fill arenas and keep fans engaged.
By contrast, a recent Deloitte study offered somewhat unsettling conclusions for Hollywood, finding that a majority of Gen Z-ers (the age 15-28 cohort) feel a “stronger personal connection” to YouTube and TikTok influencers than movie and TV stars.
Notably, the NBA’s top tier of players includes several stars that have begun producing and appearing in movies and TV shows during their playing careers, with the likes of LeBron James — already a Hollywood power player through his partnership with Maverick Carter — Stephen Curry (whose comedy “Mr. Throwback” was just canceled by Peacock) and Kevin Durant all having positioned themselves for media lives beyond the day when worn-out knees will stop carrying them up the court.
In hindsight, this year’s trade deadline turned out to be a huge boon to the league’s fortunes, highlighted by Dallas sending charismatic young superstar Luka Dončić to the Los Angeles Lakers, where he seems well equipped to inherit the mantle of the United States’ second-largest media market from the 40-year-old James; and Miami dealing Jimmy Butler to the Golden State Warriors, playing alongside Curry, whose three-point marksmanship remains dazzling at the (geriatric, by basketball standards) age of 37.
Viewership jumped 16% after the trade deadline, and suddenly, stories about the NBA being in big trouble have largely faded. As the website Awful Announcing noted, the overall ratings boxscore for the 2024-25 season suggests all that “league in crisis” talk amounted to “the most overblown story of the year.”
Indeed, after a slow start viewership of NBA games finished the regular season roughly on par with the 2023–24 campaign — ABC, ESPN and TNT averaged 1.53 million viewers, down 2% from last season’s four-year high — tune-in for the flagship ABC/ESPN package is actually up 10%.
In a fragmented age where sports represent one of the few genres capable of defying ratings gravity, the league has performed well enough to mollify skittish media partners, after Disney, NBCUniversal and Amazon’s Prime Video ponied up a dizzying $76 billion collectively last summer to secure TV rights through 2036.
That enhanced infusion of TV money helps explain why the the defending-champion Boston Celtics sold in March for $6.1 billion — the highest sum for any North American sports franchise, and three times the then-head-turning amount Steve Ballmer paid for the L.A. Clippers in 2014, at the time an NBA record.
In one trend that has been years in the making, the NBA has been especially adept in finding European talent to boost its appeal around the world, including Dončić (Slovenia), Nikola Jokić (Serbia), Victor Wembanyama (France) and Giannis Antetokounmpo (Nigeria by way of Greece).
According to the NBA, revenue from global partnerships rose by double-digit percentages this season, and Dončić, Wembanyama and Jokić ranked first, sixth and 10th among the most popular jerseys. (Curry and James, not surprisingly, clock in second and third on that list, followed by Boston’s Jayson Tatum and New York’s Jalen Brunson.)
The league’s push to grow its international footprint can be seen on and off the court, Winik noted. “The globalization of basketball has elevated the level of talent in the NBA, with 30% of NBA players born outside of the United States,” he said, adding that those players “foster a unique connection between the NBA and the fans from their respective countries.”
While Dallas had to make the questionable decision of trading Dončić to allow for the baton pass in L.A. — not incidentally, the league leader in terms of team merchandise — the bottom line is the NBA now has a clear heir apparent to James to further cement both its appeal to Hollywood and international flavor.
The NBA’s ability to keep reeling in viewers includes a more pragmatic consideration for Hollywood, since the timing of the playoffs — which will run well into June — traditionally serve as a major platform to promote summer movies, particularly to an elusive young-male audience.
Granted, NBA-Hollywood parallels only go so far, but there’s enough overlap to warrant paying attention to the league’s recent moves — starting with the manner in which its marketing has pushed marquee players. Because after losing a few battles, the NBA closes its season looking much better positioned to cash in on its version of star wars.
