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As NFL Wanes, NBA and NHL Pick Up

calamity

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Ok, so everyone is proud of the NFL becoming less popular because of outspoken people taking knees. Personally, I think it is less that than it is due to the games being bland, the characters not being compelling and the players getting put in hospitals every week than it is protests over songs. But, meh. Not my fight.

Point here is to say my favorite sport, basketball, is picking up. And, why would it not? It's a great game with great stars and great drama. You have the young guns like Giannis and Lonzo. You have mid-career superstars like Kyrie, Westbrooke, Durant and Curry. We have the aging stars like Wade, PG and Carmelo chasing one more or just one ring. And, of course, we have the King, the best of the rest going for his 8th straight finals appearance, 4th in a row with a team from Cleveland, no less.

We have Jason Kid coaching the most exciting team in the league, Milwaukee--Yeah, you heard that right--Milwaukee! We have a genius coaching Boston who few people have even heard of--Yeah, that would be Brad Stevens. We have Pop still doing it with smoke and mirrors. And Tibbs heading up a host of youngsters who are trying to revive the Timeberwolves.

When you have that kind of drama, who needs Football? Who cares about football?

NBA Ratings Up Nearly 30 Percent on ESPN, TNT | Media - AdAge

The NHL I'll save for a separate post---But, I'll leave you with two words: Vegas, Baby!
 
Is taking a knee even a thing now?
I hear nothing about it other than some triggered idiots here crying over it like babies.

If the NFL viewership is down, I highly doubt the national anthem thing is the true reason.

At any rate I don't care a fig for football, so if NHL ratings are going up I'm good with the whole thing.
 

There were modest gains in playoff ratings in 2017.

2017 NHL Stanley Cup Playoffs on NBC seeing ratings uptick from last year

But, that Nashville-Penguins final created a lot of Buzz. And, this year we have several new teams in the mix like Columbus, TB, and Toronto. We can also expect the Capitals to be up there and, of course, Nashville will again be expected to make a run.
 

As many started watching as stopped because of the kneeling. The NFL has been waning for years or decades. The largest current factor, in my opinion, is the concussion issue and other injuries. Knowing what the sport does to brains, and noticing the constant injuries of players on any team, it's becoming a blood sport. The biggest factor in fantasy football is players being injured (or suspended for bad or criminal behavior, or cheating, or dirty hits...).

The league would have done itself a favor to embrace the demonstrations and thus improve its image. If it can't control brain and other injuries, it will fade anyway.

Basketball and especially baseball are not blood sports.
 

I'm happy to see the NFL taken down a notch or two but it has nothing to do with the players taking a knee.

The NFL has really ****ed over a lot of hardcore fans. The new stadiums are built for higher ticket prices (less seating, more box seats, more events). The concession costs are insane. When new stadiums were being built they outpriced a lot of their long time season ticket holders.

It's also a pain to your watch your team unless they are the Pats or Steelers or you have NFL Sunday ticket.

It doesn't help that my Dolphins have been pretty bad for awhile now, but these are grievances I've had for awhile. Throw in the fact the continuous news of concussions basically killing those guys on the field...no thanks.

The NBA has started getting more and more of my time.
 

There's a lot of exciting players the past couple of years that have spent substantial time recovering.
 
iliveonramen said:
There's a lot of exciting players the past couple of years that have spent substantial time recovering.
Click to expand...

Over the years, probably all of them. Of one's top 4 fantasy draft picks, at least two miss games and one many games. That makes the waiver wire more interesting, but it's no fun to have one's champion, personal or game, bite the dust every year. If we look at the top 10 or twenty fantasy picks, it's a wasteland.
 

Another thing that makes the NFL boring is the constant stop-action aspect of the sport: 5 seconds of action followed by nearly a minute of seeing players standing around, an occasional worthwhile replay and commentators filling dead time with innocuous remarks about this or that.

I watched a couple Auburn games near the end of the CFB season. Hurry up offense with barely enough time between plays to show even important replays. Now, that was actually exciting. If the NFL adopted some of that, we might see an upturn in interest.
 
iliveonramen said:
There's a lot of exciting players the past couple of years that have spent substantial time recovering.
Click to expand...

Listening to the radio on the way home tonight as the host discussed top NFL quarterbacks, I was stunned to hear how man were out due to injury.

Luck may never play again. Bridgewater probably will, but to what level is still an unknown. Watson may end up the next RG3. Rodgers has 13 screws in his collar and god only knows what effect that will have long term. Wentz needs a year to rehab a knee, and may end up like the other Carson who blew out his knee just as he was beginning to become a star. Speaking of the other Carson, Palmer, Sam Bradford, and Ryan Tannehill are also out for the '17 season. If we add the injuries which slowed Derreck Carr and Marcus Mariotta early on, we have almost a quarter of the league's starting QB's either on IR or damned close to it.

I blame the league being too cheap to pay for decent O-lines. Most have only one NFL quality player for each position, and once he goes down, in goes a slug. And, once the slugs become a majority of your O-line, your QB gets killed.
 

I record a game and start watching a few minutes late to fast forward through commercials and between plays. I do my own replays and watch if new angles are needed. In AC, with any snack and reasonably priced beverage. Paying to sit in the stands? Not likely.
 
I just watched a great game between the red hot Bulls (winners of 7-straight) and the Cavs. The game lasted almost exactly 2 hours, flowed quickly and was very entertaining. Young, aggressive Bulls against the methodical, older Cavs. D Wade showed up on D, LBJ scores 34 points to give the Cavs a 3-point win.

Another good game that is on right now is conference leader Boston playing the resurgent Knicks. I'll probably tune into it around the start of the 4th Q. Same deal there. The game will last only about 2 hours, will flow quickly, and be very entertaining.

Contrast all that with your typical NFL game. 3-plus hours, no flow, and only a few entertaining moments out of 200 minutes of yawn. If not for last week's very compelling Steeler-Pats game, I'd say this year had no good games at all. At least no games that were good for 200 minutes.
 

It's a QB centric league as they've made every rule in the book to protect and improve passing attacks. The fact that all of these marquee players are out for extended periods is a major nail in the coffin.
 
The best sport for fast, free flowing action is, without a doubt, hockey. I can do without the two long intermissions though. Hockey should be two halves of about 25 minutes each with one intermission. But, the actual game flows very fast with very few stoppages of play. And, even when they stop the game for this or that, like a shot on goal that gets grabbed by the goalie or a frozen puck, off sides, icing etc, the face-off happens within a few short seconds, and the fast action begins all over again.

Hockey's best idea: line changes during live play. No stoppage of play to make substitutions. Basketball requires a stoppage of play to make a change. And football has nothing but stoppage of plays. So, they have the opposite problem.
 
As much as I love basketball, gangsta ball ruined the NBA for me.
 
Top Cat said:
As much as I love basketball, gangsta ball ruined the NBA for me.
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It's not like that anymore. Allen Iverson retired a long time ago. You can't possibly look at LeBron James, Giannis, Lonzo, Durante, Curry, etc. and see gangsters.
 
calamity said:
It's not like that anymore. Allen Iverson retired a long time ago. You can't possibly look at LeBron James, Giannis, Lonzo, Durante, Curry, etc. and see gangsters.
Click to expand...

They ruined it for me. That and the systematic raping of the Seattle fans by David Stern and Clay Bennett.
 
Top Cat said:
They ruined it for me. That and the systematic raping of the Seattle fans by David Stern and Clay Bennett.
Click to expand...

Had they stayed in Seattle , and NBA hero gone bad, baby-daddy Sean Kemp, was replaced by stand-up consummate professional, Kevin Durante, you'd probably not still have this opinion. Add to that, seeing Russel Westbrooke every night, and I bet you'd be as much of an NBA fan as I am watching LBJ and company drag Cleveland to the finals every year.
 

And if "ifs and buts" were candy and nuts...:lamo
 
Top Cat said:
And if "ifs and buts" were candy and nuts...:lamo
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Something like that--sure. Live in Sacramento, and I'm sure the NBA is not at all popular. Live in Oakland, and it's probably the only sport anyone talks about. Live in Cleveland, and you can forget the Browns suck more than any other team in history because you can always tune in to LeBron James scoring 30-plus per game and winning his conference. LA is still a Laker town. And Boston, even with the Pats and Sahx, still bleeds green.
 
MLS should pick up some of the NFL refugees. It's playoffs are in the late fall.
 
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