In case you haven’t noticed, the Los Angeles Lakers captured their 17th NBA title earlier this week, tying the Boston Celtics in that category. Problem is, nobody cares. A closer look at the numbers reveal that in Game 5 of the six-game series, a puny 5 million TV viewers tuned in to watch the Lakers and the Miami Heat. Compare this to 18 million viewers in last year’s fifth game between the Golden State Warriors and Toronto Raptors, which also went six games.
So what happened? The simple truth was that NBA fans and the sports world got tired of the political intrusion–huge Black Lives Matter decals on the court, radical political slogans on their jerseys. Enough already! After months without any sports, in light of COVID-19, fans simply wanted a respite from the doom and gloom of the pandemic, not a bunch of BLM drivel shoved in their faces.
At the forefront of the social-justice incursion was Lakers’ superstar Lebron James, with his senseless blather night after NBA night. Says political commentator Bill O’Reilly, “Lebron James has ruined the league.” Not only did the NBA lose millions of of its TV audience during the season, sales of team merchandise dramatically plummeted, leading the league to announce there will be no more political slogans next year.
Then there was Lebron’s pal, Colin Kaepernick of NFL fame, adding salt to the wound during the abbreviated season by penning a radical essay calling for the abolition of law enforcement and prisons. “When you enter Crazyland, whether you’re a TV network, a sports franchise, most Americans say we don’t want to go to Crazyland. And we’re not,” O’Reilly says. Here’s more with O’Reilly on The First.
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