It’s about the NBA Cup and the November 3 of this year. But to understand its purpose and relevance, we need to take a step back and be clear about how the league works. Currently, the 30 teams are divided into two conferences and they play a regular phase consisting of 82 parties. At the end of this stage, which runs from late October to mid-April, 16 teams qualify for the playoffs. From there, it’s a single-elimination bracket where they compete in series of up to 7 games to advance to the next round.
The problem that the NBA is that the audience levels for the regular phase are considerably lower than those of the playoffs. While a regular season match has an average audience of 1.59 million people (and falling from previous years), one of the playoffs does it for 5.47 million.
So they said: “Why don’t we create a new tournament that feeds off the regular season matches and allows us to offer more excitement outside of the playoffs?”and thus was born the NBA Cup.
In this new tournament, the 30 teams are divided into groups of 5 and compete against each other to qualify for the next phase. All matches, except for the final, count for the regular phase. That is, the clubs are not going to play any more games during the season. Now, certain matches of the regular season, in addition to being taken into account to advance to the playoffs, are part of this tournament. The most interesting thing about all this is the moment of launch: the NBA is negotiating the television rights of the league for the next 9 years. currently receives some $2.6 billion a year from Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery. However, they expect to obtain between 5 and 8 billion dollars a year in this renegotiation. That is, 2 to 3 times the current value.
The NBA Cup seeks to solve a problem that the league has had for years (the low interest in the regular season matches), but it does so at a key moment in economic terms. Let’s remember that broadcast rights are the league’s main source of revenue. As of this modification, they sit at the table with the media companies and not only offer them the 82 games per team of the regular season, but also sell them a new competition. In this way, without making almost any changes to the calendar of the teams, the NBA created a new asset that will be part of the television offer in the coming seasons.
Source: The Business of Sport.
2023-08-23 14:33:53
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