Courtesy StefanCoders / Pixabay
As NBA viewership continues to trend downward during the 2024-25 season, everyone from commentators to fans have theories about why. While some point to the increased prevalence of three-point shots in the league making it less exciting to watch, there could be another culprit: the price to follow your favorite team.
NFL fans might find this issue all too familiar, as the leadup to this season saw many outlets covering the high prices fans would have to pay to watch all NFL games every weekend. This was partially due to the amount of NFL games that are now exclusively on streaming services due to new rights deals with companies like Netflix and Amazon Prime. While the NBA doesn’t have deals like these yet, tallying up the cost of following one team through the entire 80-game season reveals sky-high prices.
Imagine for a moment that you're a fan of the Minnesota Timberwolves, living in Minneapolis. 25 of the Timberwolves' 80 games this season, not counting any postseason appearances, are nationally televised.
The remaining 55 games are only televised via streaming or through the local market, meaning you’ll have to turn to your local broadcasting network for most of the season. For Minnesota, this is the newly renamed FanDuel Sports Network. To catch any of Minnesota's non-nationally televised games, you’ll have to shell out $107.99 a season to watch the team through a FanDuel Subscription.
Back to the nationally televised games, of which the team will have eight on TNT, eight on ESPN, two on ABC, and seven on NBA TV.
If you wanted to watch only the TNT games, you could simply pay about $80 for an eight month subscription to HBO Max, which does give you access to all games aired on TNT during the regular and postseason.
For all of the nationally televised games, you would have to subscribe to YouTube TV for $583.92 for eight months.
Another more expensive option if you wanted to catch most of the nationally televised games, would be paying $655.95 for eight months of Hulu with Live TV, which gives you access to TNT games, ESPN Games, and ABC Games. Hulu does not carry NBA TV as a channel.
And that's only if you're trying to watch the Minnesota Timberwolves as someone who lives in Minnesota. If your team doesn’t make it to the postseason, it can get a little cheaper as you don’t have to be subscribed to YouTube TV or Hulu Live TV for as long, but if your favorite team is not the team closest to where you live, it can get more expensive.
A subscription to NBA League Pass, which allows you to watch all games not nationally televised or televised exclusively on NBA TV is slightly more expensive than a season subscription to Fanduel Sports Network. The upside to this is that a League Pass subscription allows you to watch any team in the league as long as they are not your home team. League Pass has blackouts for all local markets depending on where you sign up from. As a Timberwolves fan in Minnesota, you wouldn’t be able to watch any of their games on League Pass unless it was on NBA TV, but as a Timberwolves fan from Charlotte, you would be able to watch all of their games.
After navigating all of the streaming services and subscriptions, here’s a breakdown of about what it costs to watch NBA Games this season:
Cost of watching only nationally televised games: $583.92
Cost of watching all local televised games: $107.99
Cost of watching all games for nonlocal teams: $692
Cost of watching all games for local teams: $641
A total cost of about $641 for the entire regular and postseason is daunting to look at as a fan of the sport, much less as a casual fan looking to watch a couple of games a year. Before blaming the lack of NBA viewership on the entertainment value of the games themselves, it might be time to think about those who want to watch but can no longer afford to.
Edited by Emily Tsipis
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