For years the NBA has, arguably, been the most dramatic and exciting sports league in America.
It’s still the little brother to the NFL, but to those who aren’t familiar with football’s grasp atop the sports league hierarchy, it may not seem that way. That’s because the storylines and personalities that are tied so closely to the NBA constantly seem to break through to the mainstream media.
Last season was the perfect example of this. The Luka Doncic-Anthony Davis trade was one of the most shocking moments in sports history. LeBron James added to his legacy by playing alongside his son, Bronny James. Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Nikola Jokic had one of the best MVP races of all time. And it all concluded with a seven-game series between the best team in the league and a team on the craziest playoff run of all time.
Yet, after a season with the most media coverage in NBA history, this legendary Game Seven was the lowest-rated of all time. The game had 16.35 million viewers, less than the average of the 2018 NBA Finals, which is widely regarded as one of the most boring sports finals of all time. Meanwhile, the MLB’s World Series also went the distance this season, but Game Seven had 26.88 million viewers. Granted, they had the Shohei Ohtani boost, but it’s clear that something’s wrong with the NBA.
Not only is the NBA getting lapped by other sports leagues in viewership, but it’s not even experiencing growth. NBA viewership dropped by 2% to 5% last season, and Finals viewership has never been able to fully recover from the ratings hits from the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s gotten to the point that even NBA Commissioner Adam Silver publicly said that he “thinks about it a lot.”
Luckily for Silver, it seems that he’s found a solution. More than 87 million people watched games by late December 2025, an 89% increase from last season. The reason for this isn’t more interesting storylines ﹘ LeBron didn’t even play for the first two months of the season, and it feels like the Oklahoma City Thunder have already won the championship. In reality, it’s because the NBA inadvertently solved a problem that’s been plaguing the league for years now.
Most sports fans can relate to wanting to watch a game, but being unable to. Perhaps they don’t have the NFL Sunday Ticket, a $276 pass to access all Sunday afternoon NFL games throughout the season. Or maybe they’re not paying for Space City Home Network, a $200 service that exclusively provides all Rockets and Astros games. Over the past few seasons, the price tag that comes with simply wanting to watch one’s favorite team has turned many to pirating games and watching them on easily-accessible platforms like StreamEast, the world’s largest illegal sports streaming website.
But the 2025-2026 season marked the beginning of a new era of NBA media. The NBA left TNT and signed off on an 11-year contract with both NBC and Amazon Prime. This came along with the introduction of the NBA App’s ‘Tap To Watch,’ a feature that makes games easier to tune into. Both of these things led to more NBA games being more accessible for millions of more fans. Though these two options still have a price tag on them, these services were either already owned by fans or are simply more valuable. For example, the most basic plan of Peacock that offers sports games is $10.99 a month; a much better option compared to the most basic plan of NBA League Pass, a plan that offers access to all games, which is $16.99 a month. The beginning solution to the NBA’s viewership problem was simply making it more affordable and accessible, which they’ve already made a lot of progress in solving.
Still, many problems remain with the NBA when you begin to look at its main rival (if you can even call it that), the NFL: the NFL’s 2025 regular season averaged 18.7 million viewers per game, its second-highest average ever. For this historically well-performing NBA season, average viewership sits at 2.02 million viewers per game. Of course, football and the NFL simply have a stronger chokehold on America, and that won’t be changing anytime soon, but there are many notes to take from the NFL’s strategy of gaining viewership.
As the NBA tries to stop bleeding fans, here are just two solutions to continue fixing the growing lack of interest in the league, mostly taking from the precedent set by the NFL and other top sports leagues.
1. Expansion
This feels inevitable. Commissioner Adam Silver already said that he’d be making a decision on league expansion sometime in 2026, and it’s no secret that the NBA has its eyes on Seattle and Las Vegas. As the NBA continues to look into the economics of it all, there’s plenty of evidence on the table for why they should pursue it.
The NBA needs more roster spots; there are just too many good players out there. Mac McClung is a perfect example. For years, he has dominated the G-League, winning a championship in 2023 and MVP in 2024. Because of his strong play, many NBA teams have looked at him and called him up to be on their roster. However, since there’s an overflow of guards in the league, he’s never been able to find a home, and usually gets cut from the roster before he can ever even settle into a role. In just five seasons, he’s been on 11 different NBA and G-League teams.
This has led many strong NBA players to take their talents overseas, where they make more money and get more playing time. Former G League MVP Trevelin Queen is one of the best players in the Chinese Basketball Association. Lonnie Walker IV is getting paid the most money he’s ever made by competing in the Israeli Premier League. A few years ago, former All-Star DeMarcus Cousins made a statement by going to Taiwan, dominating the league and becoming famous in Asia. If the NBA wants to retain its players, they need to make more room.
As previously mentioned, the NBA would most likely be expanding to Seattle and Las Vegas. This would mark a return to Seattle, which the city’s been begging for since the Supersonics moved to Oklahoma City in 2008. The NBA would also be the last of the Big Four sports leagues to move to Las Vegas, a trend started by the NHL when it added the Las Vegas Knights in 2017. These two cities also stand out because there are too many teams in the eastern half of the United States, which has caused cities like Memphis and New Orleans to be in the Western Conference. For simplicity’s sake, this article will use Seattle and Las Vegas as placeholder teams for expansion.
However, many other cities have been rumored as possible expansion candidates though. The Hampton Roads metropolitan area in Virginia made a proposal in 2017, Hartford had a bid in 2024, and Louisville has attempted to pull teams over multiple times in the past few decades. Many cities across America with a well-established sports scene seem like strong candidates as well: Nashville, St. Louis, and Pittsburgh, amongst others. The NBA could even go a different direction and expand across the borders. Montreal is the largest market in North America without an NBA franchise, Vancouver previously hosted the Vancouver Grizzlies for six seasons, and Mexico City has openly been on Adam Silver’s eye for many years.
The NBA should take from the NFL’s current setup in terms of league structure: two conferences of 16 teams and eight divisions of four teams. It would look something like this:
Western Conference
Mountain: Denver, Las Vegas, Oklahoma City, Phoenix
Northwest: Minnesota, Portland, Seattle, Utah
Pacific: Golden State, Los Angeles Clippers, Los Angeles Lakers, Sacramento
Southwest: Dallas, Houston, New Orleans, San Antonio
Eastern Conference
Atlantic: Boston, Brooklyn, New York, Philadelphia
Central: Chicago, Indiana, Milwaukee, Memphis
Northeast: Cleveland, Detroit, Toronto, Washington
Southeast: Atlanta, Charlotte, Miami, Orlando
This new alignment isn’t perfect, but it does multiple things. Other than a few rivalries in today’s central division, it keeps every rivalry intact. It groups teams that are in the same state. And it provides balance geographically. As this article continues into the second solution, this format will be used.
2. Fix the Schedule
When it comes to attracting viewers on a nightly basis, there’s one major difference between the NFL and the NBA. Every NFL game matters, and every NBA game doesn’t.
In the NFL, each team plays 17 games over 18 weeks. Since 2000, only two teams have ever made the Playoffs after losing their first three games. That means missing just 12 quarters of football most likely means missing the entire story of the year. Meanwhile, NBA teams can often go an entire month (about 13 games) as the best or worst team in the league, and it doesn’t really mean anything at the end of the year.
Just last season, the Brooklyn Nets were the fourth-best team in the East after 11 games over three weeks of play. Fast forward to the end of the season, and they were 12th in the standings and not even close to making the playoffs. Meanwhile, the Miami Heat had the sixth-longest losing streak of the season, losing 10 games in a row over 18 days, and they still made the playoffs. Of course, both of these periods mattered in the final seeding of the season, but months of basketball end up being rather forgettable by the end of the year.
Most fans and players can agree that the NBA needs to shorten its season, but the conversation gets difficult when it comes to specifics. Of course, they can’t go down to 17 games like the NFL — basketball isn’t physically demanding enough to excuse that. And they can’t go down to 31 games like NCAA basketball — the NBA is too large a league for that to make sense.
The first consideration would be 72 games, which the NBA tried in the 2020-2021 season due to the COVID pandemic. Most fans and players enjoyed the shortened season, but it didn’t help their viewership problem. The real answer has to consider this: what is the maximum number of games that the NBA can play, while still making every game matter? The number that I’ve come to is 50 games.
4 NBA Cup games (4)
2 games against each division rival (6)
2 games against each conference opponent (24)
1 game against each team in the opposite conference (16)
When it comes to the NBA Cup, the NBA has a product with a lot of potential — it’s high-stakes basketball in the middle of the year. The only problem is that it’s terribly scheduled. Group play games just happen on a random batch of nights scattered across a month, three weeks into the season. Not only does nobody keep track of the seven nights that the NBA deems more important than the others, but it’s so early in the season that it doesn’t even matter anyway. Like in 2024, the NBA Cup champions were the Milwaukee Bucks; fast forward five months later, and they ended their season with a first-round loss. In the grand span of the NBA season, it simply doesn’t matter.
The solution to this is to just put it at a better time. I would propose to have the championship a week before the trade deadline. This makes the NBA Cup an opportunity for teams to treat it as a preview of the playoffs. Teams will genuinely attempt to see if their roster is the best in the league, and if not, then they’ll hastily make moves to fix their roster before the deadline.
The most important change here is playing two games against division rivals. To take from the NFL again, division winners should get home-field advantage in the playoffs. In the NBA, divisional rivalries don’t really exist, and rivalries come about more by happenstance than anything. However, in the NFL, divisional rivalries are exciting and impactful. Almost every game against a division rival has high stakes and is attached to bragging rights. If the NBA wants to bring rivalries into their league, the solution isn’t throwing in a ‘Rivalry Week’ in the middle of the year (as they just tried to do and miserably failed at getting people to care about), but simply making the games matter.
A home-and-away series against each conference opponent is standard, and makes each matchup important for seeding. Meanwhile, just one game against inter-conference teams may seem low, but it makes each game a lot more exciting. A matchup between the West’s best team and the East’s best team in the middle of the season would be a must-watch game, and also make predicting the NBA Finals much harder.
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There are many problems with the NBA. The Draft Lottery shouldn’t include Play-In teams. They should stop scheduling back-to-backs. All-Star Weekend is terribly boring. However, all of these things are small, and the average fan doesn’t really care. But just like fixing the accessibility to NBA games, expanding the league and changing the schedule would positively impact every single fan and bring new interest to the league on a nightly basis. The more that the NBA begins to realize that their fans don’t care like they used to, the more that they’ll lean into radical changes like these.
