Boston Celtics head coach Joe Mazzulla has a front-row seat watching Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown, and that’s enough for him — literally.
The league has endured a blow to its television ratings, most recently coming to life during the NBA Cup. While teams such as the Celtics received a much-needed break, the Milwaukee Bucks and Oklahoma City Thunder battled it out for the NBA Cup title, and nobody seemed to care. The tournament’s semifinal matchups, which also included the Atlanta Hawks and Houston Rockets, underwent a 19% drop in viewership from last season, per Sports Media Watch.
Mazzulla, from the comforts of home during his off time, revealed that tunning in for NBA basketball matchups isn’t interesting enough for the third-year coach.
“I add to that. I don’t watch NBA games,” Mazzulla told reporters at Wednesday’s team practice, per CLNS Media. “So I’m just as much the problem as anyone else is. I don’t like watching the games.”
Mazzulla added: “I’m around (NBA basketball) all the time so I would rather watch something else.”
When NBA commissioner Adam Silver first introduced the regular-season tournament over a year ago, the reactions were dispersed but tamed. The reception began to swing in favor of the league once the usual mundaneness of a November matchup had real stakes involved, giving fans something to look forward to. Mazzulla unleashed a “Hack-a-Shaq” inspired defense against the Chicago Bulls, point differentials kept teams and fans stalking the scoreboards across the league and Silver’s vision became a reality.
Now, the opposite has occurred, and the engagement hasn’t lived up to par with what viewership was last season. There’s no clear-cut source to point fingers toward, but considering this trend snuck its way from the regular season into tournament play — designed to bolster viewership — the league is left searching for answers.
“I would just say, to say it directly, ratings are down a bit at the beginning of the season, but cable television viewership is down double digits so far this year versus last year,” Silver said, per ESPN’s Tim Bontemps. “We’re almost at the inflection point where people are watching more programming on streaming than they are in traditional television. And it’s a reason why for our new television deals, which we’re entering into next year, every game is going to be available on a streaming service.”
Mazzulla, although with few words to offer in response to the ratings topic, does have plenty to say to those throwing the Celtics under the bus. Boston’s 3-point-heavy style that took the team to the promised land last season is among the most repeated conversation points brought up to link with the viewership collapse.
“It’s an interesting perspective, I think, because in the NFL people aren’t like, ‘I wanna see less scoring,'” Mazzulla said. “They’re not gonna make the end zones smaller. They’re not gonna make the field smaller. Scoring is up across other sports and I guess my question would be why in basketball is scoring up being an issue as opposed to other sports? Does anybody wanna watch a football game and see less touchdowns? I think at the end of the day, anything new or change is different.”
