In response to a question about the viewership and accessibility of the streaming market, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver recently announced during a press conference that the NBA is a “highlight-based sport.” This statement, problematic for its own reasons, greatly disturbed me, making me think: how much does it actually cost to watch the NBA this season?
For my sanity, I did this with a single team’s schedule: the New York Knicks. The NBA wants me to get League Pass for the season. For all intents and purposes, the league’s one-stop shop is not a solution for me or any Knicks fan in my home zip code. If the Knicks are playing their intercity rival, the Brooklynn Nets (despite their stadiums being a 15-minute drive from each other) or they’re playing their regional rival, the Boston Celtics, you can’t watch it.
While the Knicks themselves are not blacked out at my home address, NBA League Pass gets really finicky with its blackout zip code borders. Some weird spots in central Connecticut (Bristol) are blacked out from all three teams. Due to TV deals and regional sports networks, the league can’t really create a valid direct-to-consumer option without making the regional sports monopolies angry, so for now, we say no to League Pass.
This is more reasonable in the northeast, but a map created by a Reddit user highlights a significant issue once you head west. Albuquerque is roughly 300 miles from the nearest NBA stadium, but both the Nuggets and the Suns are blocked out for them entirely. This is a similar issue noted by Foolish Bailey in his video about MLB blackouts, where the state of Iowa is unable to watch 6 MLB teams in their local markets. Still, all of them are located multiple hours away from the state.
For the regional networks, Gotham Sports is the solution for New York City sports teams. I couldn’t sign up initially because the browser thinks I am outside of the broadcast area, which, according to the website, is “New York, Connecticut, and parts of New Jersey and Pennsylvania.”
So, after some location shenanigans, I get into the page, and the only option visible to me is the $41.99 a month option – giving you access to the Yankees, Nets, Rangers and the Knicks. There is the MSG+ only version, just $21.99, which is just the Rangers and Knicks. This does not give you access to national broadcast games, which you need from Peacock, Amazon Prime, and ESPN Unlimited – which isn’t ESPN+/ESPN Select, I recently learned.
ESPN Unlimited may or may not include your local ABC feed, so there may be some games you can’t watch because they are not forwarded to either your local ABC feed or ESPN – so to cover all your bases, you can bite the bullet and pay for a Sling Blue TV subscription for $45.99 — is what I thought you could do. Depending on where you live, you may not get access to said local channels, so your best bet is getting YouTube TV for $82.99 a month.
Factoring in Connecticut taxes, extrapolating the prices for 8 months yields a total cost of $1,305.55. Which is an amount that many people do not want to dedicate to watching sports.
When you consider this price, Silver comes across as deliberately adding to the pain of the possibility of not being able to watch your favorite sports teams. He argues that a lot of the content is free on social media, thanks to highlights. However, I think highlight culture is destroying online sports discussions because if you only watch the highlights, you might not understand what’s really going on. Highlight reels are crafted for social media fame, not to give you the full context.
Another factor that ties into this is the general decline of shared experiences, such as sitting around with family and watching a game. Most commonly, this happens with the NFL, with Sunday Night Football becoming a ritualistic gathering of sorts. Given the numerous paywalls in the NBA, you might be better off following the game’s feed through Google. Suns owner Matt Ishbia provided free TV antennas to fans after they stepped away from their Bally Sports deal — similar to how the Arizona Diamondbacks did an in-market plan for MLB.TV, their equivalent to League Pass.
Access to the games was already becoming an issue: not everyone can afford to drive through a major city and pay a couple of hundred dollars to get into a stadium to see basketball. This just escalates the problem!
So how do you watch the NBA? Of course, there’s the open but still hidden secret of Streameast—but the main website has been shut down. It’s almost as if the NBA is asking people to leave the island of legality behind and sail the seven seas.