Shaq seems to know the reason why NBA’s television audience is in decline

It’s no secret that the NBA TV rating have been declining in recent history, but even more so in the past couple of seasons, and Shaquille O’Neal guarantees he knows the reasons why. In recent stories covered by Awful Announcing and Front Office Sports, this 2024-25 campaign seems to have lost many viewers since opening night. 

It was on a recent show of his Big Podcast on the DraftKings network, where the Hall of Famer explained his points of view. The Lakers legend believes one of the most important reasons is that the sport now features too many three-point attempts and doesn’t offer any more depth to the game, as it used to.

“It’s down because we’re looking at the same thing,” Shaq expressed. “Everybody is running the same plays…Steph Curry and those guys messed it up. I don’t mind Golden State back in the day shooting threes, but every team isn’t a 3-point shooter. So why everybody has the same strategy? I think it makes the game boring.”

Shaq believes NBA viewership is down because everyone wants to shoot threes

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— NBACentral (@TheDunkCentral) November 7, 2024

Now, there are many other explanations that explain why the league’s viewership keep going down, as there are very little subscribers to the cable and satelital packages, or the fact that the regular season matches feel like there’s not much at stake in an 82-game competition where 10 teams from each conference can make it to the playoffs.

Many feel these are two many contests which don’t feel meaningful at all, not athletically or symbolically. In a way, this also translates to the court, where many fans have begun to feel as if the players have no need to give their best efforts to earn victories.

However, O’Neal is convinced that it is mostly about the numerous amounts of attempts from beyond the arc, that have forever changed the basketball game and its natural flow. “The game has already been perfect ever since Naismith created it,” he claimed.

“This new era of humans f–ked it up… Golden State came in and changed it and you made a great point, it’s a copycat league,” he added. “Everybody wants to be Steph Curry, but everybody’s not Steph Curry and that’s why viewership is down. But these dudes, they need to wake up because if viewership is down, the money is gonna come down.”

Shaquille is not the only person who has been warning the NBA world about how the three-point era has made the game too predictable

I guess you can call the modern NBA to be quite predictable, now that even dynasties have been built over the three-point strategy, changing the basketball game forever. Shaquille is not the first or the only person who has been beating this same drum, just as NBA writer Bob Ryan has been doing for over a decade.

“For me, the 3-point shot is the single worst thing to happen to basketball in my lifetime. And let’s back up for a little history, OK? Yeah. The ABA did not introduce the 3-point shot. The ABA absorbed the 3-point shot. The 3-point shot. As we know, it was a gimmick of a promoter. I would repeat that, folks,” he said recently on OutKick’s Don’t @ Me with Dan Dakich.

“It was not asked for by anybody in the NBA. It was the gimmick of a promoter,” he insisted. “That man being Abe Saperstein, the impresario of the Harlem Globetrotters, who founded a league in 1961 called the American Basketball League, he hoped would be in opposition to the NBA. That league lasted a year and a half. It folded in the second year. But he got a 3-point shot because he needed a gimmick.”

The legendary writer even went on to say that he anticipates the league will some day introduce newer rules that will continue to change basketball as we know it. “I have long said that there will probably be a 4-point shot in my lifetime and the 3 isn’t going anywhere. And that’s the game here. What it does is has distorted the game at every level,” Ryan assured.