In a recent segment on the ‘BIG’ podcast, former NBA superstar Shaquille O’Neal gave his take on why NBA viewership numbers have been trending down recently. According to Shaq, it all has to do with the modernized playstyle which revolves heavily around three-point shooting.
“It’s down because we’re looking at the same thing. Everybody’s running the same plays. At the damn top of the key dribble handoff,” said Shaq. “I was talking to a coach yesterday and he said ‘They want to shoot 50 threes’. Because they were trying to contemplate if I could play in this era. They said ‘Shaq if you would just shoot 50 threes’ and I’m like ‘Well how much you wanna make?’ We wanna make 10 or 15 of them.’ I was like ‘Well that’s not gonna help you win but I think everybody’s looking at the same thing and Steph Curry and those guys messed it up. I don’t mind Golden State back in the day shooting threes but every team got a three-point shooter, so why everybody has the same strategy? I think viewership will continue to go down unless we switch things up.”
Three-point attempts are at an all-time high and it’s only going up. This season, through the first few weeks, the league average is already at 106 made three-pointers on 296 attempts. Players are letting it fly from deep more than ever before and the impact of this popular trend might be felt in the form of dropping viewership and fan numbers.
In truth, the NBA had been trending up for years but something changed recently where the numbers are going down. This season, after a promising opening night, viewership has taken a sharp decline with ESPN reporting a 42% drop in their opening night audience.
Nobody can be sure of the reason for the trend, but Shaquille O’Neal believes that the three-point revolution is to blame. With the three-ball being more popular than ever, it has simplified offenses and limited variety in playstyles across the league.
Where we had teams before who utilized different strategies to win, pretty much every relevant team lives and dies by the three-pointer, which can often become stale, repetitive, and downright boring for fans to watch over and over again.
Unfortunately for the NBA, there’s no way for them to address this issue — that is if they see it as an issue at all. Unless they move the line back or implement some other system to limit three-point attempts, teams will only be looking to further incorporate it into their offense.
As we see with the Celtics, Warriors, Suns, and Cavaliers, teams who can consistently hit from distance have a massive advantage over the field and it’s why every GM and coach in the NBA is leaning so heavily on the three-pointer.
If the NBA really wants to continue growing its audience, it might need to start setting some rules in place to encourage a variety of approaches to the game. Nobody wants to see teams just jack up threes all day, especially not when it’s been happening for years already.
No doubt, Shaq wants to see a return to dominant big men and interior post-play, two things that have been somewhat lacking in recent years.
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