NBA All-Star Game flops, Daytona 500 flat, XFL sluggish on a busy weekend: Sports on TV

The NBA All-Star Game on Sunday was a flop on television.

The 72nd edition of the league’s talent showcase, played at Salt Lake City’s Vivint Arena, averaged a record-low 4.59 million combined viewers on TNT and TBS.

That’s down nearly 1.7 million viewers from a year ago and breaks down as 3.71 million viewers on TNT and another 877,000 for the simulcast on TBS.

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Why the dramatic fall-off for Team Giannis beating Team LeBron, 184-175, (and using the exciting Elam Ending format)?

Fans may have been less interested in watching with stars such as Stephen Curry, Kevin Durant and Zion Williamson out, and the game’s two captains — LeBron James and Giannis Antetokounmpo — playing only limited minutes.

There also has been a general decline in the various major leagues’ all-star contests, which have been juggling formats to retain or regrow interest. The NFL’s recent Pro Bowl, now a flag football game accompanied by various skills events, averaged 6.28 million on Disney’s ABC and ESPN broadcasts.

It’s also important to note that overall TV viewership, outside of the NFL, remains down and declining because of cord-cutting that’s not yet offset by streaming subscriptions.

Additionally, while a bummer of a total viewership number for the NBA and networks, the game still did win the night’s key advertiser demographics — biggest fish in a shrinking pond effect — by edging the Daytona 500 in the 18-49 age cohort by about 10,000 viewers (1.821 million viewers in that group to 1.811 million).

NBA All-Star Game TV viewership

The All-Star Game’s live draft that was broadcast an hour earlier than the game itself averaged 3.4 million viewers, up from 460,000 a year ago when it was held days before the game, the league said, while the celebrity game on Friday evening averaged 1.4 million viewers on ESPN (which was a small year-over-year uptick).

Saturday night’s events, including the slam dunk content dramatically won by the 76ers’ recently promoted G League player Mac McClung and Portland’s Damian Lillard winning the 3-point contest, averaged 3.4 million viewers, the league said. That also is the lowest average in decades, per Sports Media Watch.

Sunday’s All-Star Game had an 8:30 p.m. Eastern tipoff and faced competition from the relaunched XFL on ESPN (918,000), “American Idol” on ABC (5.26 million), and “The Equalizer” on CBS (5.9 million) — nothing truly enormous.

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While not monetized like linear TV but still an important part of the league’s growth strategy, the NBA’s social and digital platforms saw 1.75 billion viewers for the all-star weekend, the league said, which is a record for the multi-day event.

The NBA All-Star Game’s record TV audience was nearly 23 million viewers on NBC in 1993. An eyeball decline began when the event moved from broadcast TV to cable in 2003. Prior to the pandemic, the game had been averaging 7.6 million viewers for about a decade.

ESPN and Turner Sports pay a combined $2.6 billion annually for NBA national broadcast rights, or $24 billion in total when the deals that began in 2016 end in 2025. Those rights for Turner have included the All-Star Game since 2003, and the league reportedly wants to see its overall media rights value reach $75 billion for its next round of deals — which are expected to include a major streaming element.

Sunday’s game was also played during a busy sports weekend.

The iconic Daytona 500 averaged 8.18 million viewers on Fox for Ricky Stenhouse Jr.’s double-overtime victory on Sunday, in a race that saw 52 lead changes among 21 drivers.

That average is for Fox, Fox’s Spanish-language channel and digital platforms — and it makes it the most-watched sporting event on U.S. television over the weekend.

Still, it was down a little from 2022 when the Fox broadcast averaged 8.86 million viewers for Austin Cindric’s first career victory. In 2021, the race averaged 4.83 million people watching, which was a record low that broke the old nadir of 7.33 million set in 2020.

Tiger Woods played in last week’s PGA Tour Genesis Open in Los Angeles and made the cut into the weekend to help lift CBS’ broadcast numbers to 3.42 million viewers on Sunday (up from 2.6 million in 2022, when Woods was still on a limited schedule while recovering from his terrible leg injury). The Saturday round averaged 2.84 million viewers, an improvement over last year’s 2.13 million.

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Hockey fans got to enjoy the Hurricanes beating the Capitals, 4-1, at Carter-Finley Stadium in Raleigh as part of the NHL’s Stadium Series. The game averaged 1.13 million viewers on ABC in prime time on Saturday.

And that brings us to the gridiron.

Like zombies somehow immune to headshots, spring pro football is back for the third time in four years — with more on the way.

The XFL 3.0’s opening-weekend doubleheader came six days after the NFL enjoyed 113 million total viewers for Super Bowl LVII on Fox. So how did the revamped minor league do for the start of Season 2 that comes three years after Season 1?

• Vegas vs. Arlington — 1.53 million (ABC, 3 p.m. Saturday)
• Orlando vs. Houston — 751,000 (ESPN, 8:30 p.m. Saturday)
• St. Louis vs. San Antonio — 1.57 million (ABC, 3 p.m. Sunday)
• Seattle vs D.C. — 918,000 (ESPN, 8 p.m. Sunday)

Certainly not NFL numbers, but no one expected that. And the games occurred amid the busy weekend’s slate of college basketball games, the marquee auto racing and NBA events, golf and more. But let’s not make any excuses — the XFL’s brain trust knew the TV schedule, too.

How does the XFL’s opening-weekend viewership compare to recent spring pro football efforts on television?

The 2020 edition of the XFL, then still under WWE boss Vince McMahon’s ownership, averaged 3.3 million viewers for its inaugural game between the D.C. Defenders and Seattle Dragons on ABC on a Saturday afternoon, and a second game that evening, between the L.A. Wildcats and Houston Roughnecks, averaged 3.29 million viewers on Fox.

Two Sunday XFL games for the 2020 opening weekend averaged 3.39 million (Fox) and 2.5 million (ESPN). The league would shut down after five weeks because of the COVID-19 pandemic that mothballed nearly all sports for a time and doomed the league financially until Dwayne Johnson and partners bought it amid bankruptcy for $15 million later in 2020 and relaunched it this year.

The original XFL launched in February 2001 as a joint effort by McMahon and NBC, and its first game averaged 15.7 million viewers during a very different era of television consumption trends and technology. The league, then a far more flamboyant and silly football property, completed that season but lost $70 million and was shuttered.

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The Alliance of American Football, launched in February 2019 and shut down after eight weeks because of self-inflicted financial issues, averaged 3.25 million viewers on CBS for its opening game.

In April 2022, the rebooted minor-league version of the United States Football League debuted with a simulcast prime-time game on Fox (which owns the USFL) and NBC in a game that averaged 3.06 million viewers. That debut telecast between the New Jersey Generals and Birmingham Stallions broke down last year as 1.75 million viewers for Fox and 1.31 million for NBC. The USFL returns in April for its second season, the first spring pro football league to do so since the USFL’s higher-tier namesake in 1983-84.

So what does that all mean? The XFL 3.0 got off to a weaker start on TV than its predecessors and rivals, but it still did OK numbers in an era of television era flux.

Important context to keep in mind is that American TV viewing, outside of mainly the NFL, has been down for some time because of cord-cutting and a proliferation of entertainment alternatives. It’s an era of expensive chaos and experimentation by networks, tech giants, and sports leagues and organizations, so some things will succeed over time and others will flame out.

Additionally, competition on other networks is a major factor affecting viewership. So are things like competitiveness — blowouts lose viewers — along with storylines, market size, star players (not many in the alternative football universe), kickoff time, rivalries, broadcast versus cable or streaming, etc.

Remember, these minor-league football endeavors are on TV because the networks want to see if they’ll draw more viewers than they otherwise might have programmed in those time slots, and at what cost. As long as they’re not losing money for the broadcasters and owners, and can serve as marketing tools for other programming, they may chug along in a springtime lineup outside of the pro basketball, hockey, baseball, and gem events like The Masters that will dominate the eyeball counts.

A year ago in the equivalent post-Super Bowl Saturday afternoon time slot, when there were no alternative pro football leagues playing, ABC got 396,000 viewers for a Real Madrid game while ESPN got 1 million-plus for men’s basketball games — all competing against NBC’s Beijing Winter Olympics coverage that was getting single-digit millions of viewers.

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One important measure of alternative football leagues is how they’re doing on TV by their championship game. They all typically see viewership decline to some degree after Week 1, when the curiosity element wanes among viewers.

The XFL continues with St. Louis at Seattle at 9 p.m. Thursday on cable’s FX and then three games this weekend. The USFL’s Year 2 begins with the Memphis Showboats hosting the Philadelphia Stars at 4:30 p.m. April 15 on Fox.

All viewership data is from Nielsen and Adobe Analytics, and other metrics via the TV networks, Nielsen, Sports Media Watch, ShowBuzz Daily, 506Sports.com and the leagues. All times Eastern unless otherwise noted.

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(Top photo: Tim Nwachukwu / Getty Images)

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