Welcome back to Smallball with Kenny Beachham. I'm titling this one, our pre-flu game.

Yeah, MJ had the flu. I'm not really a stomach bug. And he went out there and he dominated at NBA

finals. This is my pre-flu game. Do I get credit for producing an episode, putting out an episode the day

before the real sickness hits? The only reason I'm saying that is because my daughter is fighting

and what I'm going to just call the cold as of right now. And as a dad, I got to do my due diligence

to make sure she feels good, which means I'm holding her, coddling her. And when you're that close

to the germs, to the viruses, I just know tomorrow I'm going to wake up and feel a lot worse than I do today. And I'm already feeling it right now. So if I get a little bit stuffy throughout this episode, if I'm even more scatterbrained than usual, which would be saying a lot, that is because this is my pre-pre-flue game. All right. On today's episode, I kind of want to go through the teams that I deem to be contenders before the season started. Has anything changed? Have we seen some teams jump up? I also want to go through our bi-weekly. We're going to call it bi-weekly power rankings. But before we do all of that, I want to talk about some news. Now, this was not originally on the run of show that I curated, but when I walk into the office here, I checked my Twitter. And the very first mention I had was from a tweet that was six days old. I don't know how I missed this, but I do want to at least talk about it at least a little bit. And it has to do with the NBA viewership declining. I'm going to give you the SparkNotes version of this very long tweet. Basically, what you need to know is this year, our double header on ESPN when the season opener was down 42% in viewership comparing it to last year, Victor Wibben Yama debut. One of the other games, Bucks v. 76ers, down 2.55 million views of last year's game, which was Celtics versus Nix.

The Sons versus Clippers were down 49% compared to last year's game.

Thursday night game had 1.45 million viewers.

That is a 29% decrease, and that was Spurs versus Mavericks.

And then this was the kicker.

Pacers versus Nix, a series that I absolutely loved.

Yeah, at the end of it, we saw a bunch of injuries, so on and so forth. The rematch of that series

where there was some animosity, hell, we saw Tarrie's Halliburton and Jalen Brunson going

WWE to make the feud real. Well, that game on national TV on a Friday night had 830 million views, I'm sorry,

830,000 views less than a college football game that was on ESPN2. Now in here, I don't know

what this ESPN2 game is. I don't know if this is a premier game, but damn it if it was a premier game,

it probably would have been on ESPN 1.

So this matchup of two teams that were in the battle for the Eastern Conference, so going to the Eastern Conference finals had that many less views than a random college football game.

And it's not ideal.

Now, the NBA is just, it's about to go into this new contract when we have a bunch of money being thrown around. We have new players in it. It's not just ESPN and Turner. It will be Amazon's. It will be the CBS and a bunch of different people are coming in. The TV deal looks amazing. Everybody's getting paid, yada, yada, yada. I do still believe that this is a problem, and I'm not completely sure how we fix it. There are a couple of things wrong with the NBA. And listen, if you're on this show or you're listening to the show, you are most likely not one of these people that we're talking about because if you're locked in the small ball with Kenny Beacham, you're probably an NBA diehard, right? But there are a few

things that contribute to this, right? This last bullet point, Pacers versus Knicks having almost,

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