GOLDEN STATE WARRIORS VS HOUSTON ROCKETS L i v e STREAM
GOLDEN STATE WARRIORS VS HOUSTON ROCKETS L i v e STREAM
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GAME 4: GOLDEN STATE WARRIORS VS HOUSTON ROCKETS L i v e STREAM
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The Golden State Warriors blew the doors off the
Houston Rockets on Sunday night in Game 3 of the Western Conference
finals, a 126-85 victory in which pretty much the entire second half was
a moot point. Such noncompetitive games are becoming a trend in recent
latter rounds of the NBA playoffs.
Over the 15
conference finals games played in 2017 and 2018, seven were decided by
at least 20 points, five of them were at least 30-point blowouts and two
margins of victory topped 40 points. Only two games were decided by
single digits. The average margin of victory in those 15 games has been
20.9 points.
You could throw last year’s NBA Finals into that mix, as well. Three of
the five games between the Warriors and Cleveland Cavaliers were decided
by at least 19 points, and the average margin of victory was 15.2
points. Yet people still tuned in: The series averaged 20.38 million
television viewers, the biggest audience for ABC since it began airing
the Finals in 2003. It was a slightly bigger overall audience than the
2016 Finals, which went seven games and drew a massive 31.02 million
viewers for the Cavs’ series-clinching win, the third-largest
single-game NBA Finals audience of all time.
Last year’s conference finals — Cavs-Celtics and Warriors-Spurs — did take a bit of a ratings hit with all the blowouts: According to Sports Media Watch,
the five-game Eastern Conference series averaged a 3.7 rating and 6.3
million viewers on TNT while the Western Conference series, a Golden
State sweep, drew a 3.9 rating and 6.5 million viewers on ESPN and ABC.
It was the first time since 2007 that neither conference final averaged a
4.0 rating. But things seem to have bounced back this year:
— Game 1 of the West finals last Monday night between the Warriors and Rockets averaged 8.8 million viewers, TNT’s most-watched West Game 1 ever
and a 38 percent increase from TNT’s coverage of East Game 1 in 2017.
It was the most-watched show on all of television during that time. The
Warriors won by 13.
— Warriors-Rockets Game 2 on Wednesday, a game Houston won by 22, drew an average of 7.5 million viewers,
again the most-watched show on TV. Over its first two games, TV ratings
for the Western Conference finals increased 41 percent from last year’s
Celtics-Cavaliers series on TNT and 16 percent from Warriors-Spurs last
season on ESPN.
The Celtics’ 25-point win in Game 1 of the East finals was the highest-rated East opener since 2015 and the most-watched since 2014.
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Ratings for Tuesday night’s Game 2 of the Cavs-Celtics East rematch on
ESPN — a 13-point Boston win — were up 71 percent from the comparable
game the year before.
At least in terms of
television viewership, the NBA seems to be blowout-proof. The reasons
are varied: There’s the presence of LeBron James, plus one superteam
that plays a compelling style of basketball (the Warriors) playing
another superteam (the Rockets) that compiled the NBA’s best regular
season record and was created specifically to stop the Warriors. This
year’s conference finals also feature three teams from top 10 television
markets: Houston is the seventh-largest market in the country, according to Nielsen,
while San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose is eighth and Boston ranks 10th.
There’s also the not-insignificant fact that the NBA is in the midst of an upswing in popularity.
Nevertheless,
the NBA and its television partners would rather that translate into
watchable games and more live content, which is one of the few reliable
commodities left in television these days. Last season’s conference
finals and NBA Finals produced only 14 out of a possible 21 games, and
few of them were actually close. That trend has continued this year, and
one has to wonder how long fans will continue to pay attention at such
consistently high rates.
