Shaquille O’Neal pinpoints biggest reason for NBA’s TV audience decline

Shaquille O’Neal believes he has identified the biggest reason for the recent decline in NBA TV ratings.

As covered in recent stories by Awful Announcing and Front Office Sports, the start to the NBA season has languished with viewers since opening night.

On his “Big Podcast” on the DraftKings network, Shaq thinks the most significant reason is that the games feature too many 3-point attempts and not enough of everything else.

“It’s down because we’re looking at the same thing,” O’Neal said. “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.”

There are plenty of other reasons why the NBA viewership has declined — there are fewer subscribers to the cable and satellite bundle, the regular season games feel like they have no stakes in an 82-game season where 10 teams from each conference make it into the postseason and a lot of the games frankly don’t feel like meaningful athletic competitions where all the players are giving their best effort to win.

Nevertheless, O’Neal pinpointed the outrageous amount of 3-point attempts that have disrupted the natural flow of the game.

“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. 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.”

This is a drum that legendary NBA writer Bob Ryan has been banging for over a decade, and he took a victory lap on a recent appearance on OutKick’s “Don’t @ Me with Dan Dakich.”

“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. It was not asked for by anybody in the NBA. It was the gimmick of a promoter. 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,” Ryan said.

“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. It’s obviously reduced the impact of the post man. No more Kevin McHale. Folks, you’re going to have to dig out the films and go to YouTube to find out what a real post player was. You never see that again and it’s changed the game. I just want balance.”