As NBA labor negotiations careen ever closer to the precipice that overlooks a multitude of negative outcomes – cancelled games, a lost season, all of us missing out on the possibility of a Jamaal Tinsley comeback – one thing becomes increasingly clear: everyone involved in those negotiations thinks that people care more about the NBA than they actually do.
The NBA is coming off a banner year. According to most reports, attendance was on the rise, ratings were up, hell, someone even let a white guy lead a team to a championship. The bad old days – the lockout of the 1998-99 season, the Melee At Auburn Hills, the Portland Jail Blazers, Bo Outlaw’s jump shot – were fading from our memories like they were chemistry formulas and we were a linebacker with a fresh concussion.
Replacing those distasteful images were bits of great theater: a generation of young, charismatic new stars, all of whom were complementing the resurgence of an old rivalry (Lakers vs. Celtics) and the development of a new one (29 Teams vs. That Asshole Who Fucked Over His Home State).
In the minds of those attached to the NBA’s fight over a new collective bargaining agreement, these recent positive developments are sufficient to overcome the stalling, time-wasting and assorted pissantery that has thus far defined some very tepid attempts at “negotiation.”
This is a mistaken conclusion. The NBA isn’t the juggernaut it thinks it is. Not only are there other things for people to do with their time; they’re already doing some of those things.
In this way, the NBA is like a Twitter user.
Let’s say @NBA has 70,000 followers. (This number is grounded in some reality. For an explanation, see the Note that appears at the end of this article.)
From @NBA’s perspective, it seems like all 70,000 of those followers are hanging on his every Tweet. But as those of us familiar with Twitter understand, this isn’t the case. At any point during the day, most of one’s followers are busy doing something else: working (one and one-half hours per day), pretending to work (six hours per day), Facebooking (three hours per day), watching shows like America’s Got Talent and So You Think You Can Dance (whatever number of hours is the number of hours of the Beast), or having sex with their rapidly-deteriorating husbands or wives (zero-point-one hours per day).
Most of the time, people are not paying attention to @NBA. And as the lockout drags on, they’re going to be paying even less attention to @NBA, now that he’s not tossing off witticisms about Sarah Palin, dropping #FFs, and participating in #uknowitbetimetobreakupwhen.
Slowly, @NBA’s followers – dedicated though they might once have seemed, what with all those @s and RTs – will slough their way toward @NCAAHoops, who for years has been busy dishing solid Tweets to its audience, which at 105,000 followers, happens to already be larger than @NBA’s.
And don’t forget about old nemesis @NFL, who’s a Rob Delaney-on-comedy-HGH-level monstrosity, with his 490,000 followers.
Or his evil (in @NBA’s world) little sister, @NCAAPigskin, who’s chugging along with an Alison Agosti-esque 200,000 followers.
Our friend @NBA, arrogant Tweeter that he is, forgot that he was far less popular – in relative terms – than he thought.
Let’s say @NBA decides to take a year’s hiatus. His follower count will plummet even further – to around 40,000. (It would be worse but he’s huge with the black audience that, if hashtaggery is any guide, makes up 84% of Twitter.)
And then, when @NBA does finally return to Tweeting, rusty, out-of-shape, and significantly less witty after the long layoff, he’ll promptly lose another 10,000 followers – people who’d forgotten they even had him on HootSuite.
With such an anemic audience remaining, it might be too late for @NBA to recover. It’s possible that he’ll return to the heights of the glory he was breaching when he decided to take a Twit on the people who turned his Follow button green. But doing so will take years of patience and Tweet after original Tweet. Smart-ass remarks added to the beginning of Kim Kardashian’s inanities aren’t going to cut it. Neither will links to YouTube videos of the hipster Olympics.
Compounding @NBA’s worries: @MLB, @NASCAR, @PGA and @NHL won’t have been sitting idly by during @NBA’s absence. They want his followers. All of them – even that annoying guy from Missouri who’s always stealing @NBA’s best work and passing it off as his own.
And they’ve got the Tweets to get those followers. (Rumor has it that @NHL writes his in a notebook he carries and crafts them for a week before he sends them.)
So here’s the deal, @NBA: your hold on the public’s attention is far less secure than you think it is. You – whether “you” are an owner, a player, a coach, a GM, a Derek Fisher, a Billy Hunter, a David Stern, or an Adam Silver, and whether “you” think you have leverage or you don’t – would be well-served to remember this:
In the sports world, as on Twitter, competition is fierce.
And your followers don’t care about you nearly as much as you think they do.
So make a deal, reach a compromise, act like you care about your audience. Because if you don’t, there might not be an audience for you to care about.
Note: the follower counts above are based (roughly) on real numbers. Based on some back-of-the-napkin calculations, the 2011 NBA Playoffs averaged around 7 million viewers per game (hence the 70,000 followers used in the example). The NCAA basketball tournament: 10.5 million viewers per game (105,000 “followers”). The NFL Playoffs: 49.0 million viewers per game (490,000 followers). As for NCAA football, this task is made harder by the NCAA’s refusal of sane procedure but, because the 2011 title game (Auburn vs. Oregon) garnered 27.3 million viewers and because other top tier bowl games rated between 12 and 20 million viewers, it seems reasonable to assume, and conservatively so, that an eight or sixteen team playoff would warrant 20 million viewers per game (200,000 followers).
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