LeBron James made his claim of the Christmas games being for the NBA and got shot a “three-point” by the NFL, as viewership numbers proved that more people watched football than those who watched basketball.
During one of the recent episodes of the PBD Podcast, entrepreneur and co-host Thomas Ellsworth called out LeBron James for the overwhelming numbers the NFL had over the NBA on Christmas day.
“LeBron James, you said there’s a lot of threes being shot, right?” he asked, directing it to the Lakers star. “Well, you had 7.7 million views on Christmas, the NFL averaged 24.2 million. That’s 3.1 [times the views of the NBA]. The NFL shot a three on you, dude, on Christmas Day! Open the package and weep.”
Ellsworth also explained why the NFL is working as a “better product” nowadays compared to the NBA.
“But I’ll tell you what’s going on: the NFL is a better product and if you put a better product on and there’s more demand for the product,” he added. “Who’s demanding it? Netflix. They bid for a couple [of] games on Christmas. So the NFL is doing a very good job of putting their product. It’s on Monday—remember it was just Monday Night Football? Then it became Sunday Night Football, then it became Thursday Night Football. Now we even have some games dropping in on Saturdays.”
“The NFL is a better product [that] the networks are bidding for. The NBA just had a very good Christmas compared to past Christmases but they are a triple behind the NFL.”
Does LeBron James Claiming “Christmas is Our Day” Hold Water?
During the Christmas Day games of the NBA, where the Los Angeles Lakers played against the Golden State Warriors and LeBron James faced off against Steph Curry, LeBron made the controversial claim that: “Christmas is our day.” However, the viewership numbers seem to paint a different picture.
The NBA Christmas day game garnered an average viewership per game of 5.25 million. Its view count peaked during the Lakers vs Warriors game with 8.2 million viewers. It had a total viewership of 26.5 million for five games and across at least four streaming platforms.
While those numbers were impressive compared to the past few years of NBA Christmas, the NFL had over 24 million average viewers per game and peaked at 27 million viewers. Overall, the NFL gathered 65 million viewers across only two games played.
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