As the NBA season tips off in earnest tonight across the country, Playfly Sports COO Craig Sloan -- whose company’s sales division, Home Team Sports, represents every RSN within the U.S. -- envisions another robust year for the league on RSNs. About 40% of all viewing that will occur in the NBA this year will happen on RSNs. "Outside of your Sunday NFL football and Saturday evening college football, the primetime audience lives on the RSN now," Sloan said, "because the entertainment programming is in such decline that the NBA games on RSNs in primetime out-deliver the broadcast prime and cable prime programming among adults 18 to 49, which is the main demographic that marketers are looking for. So you have this tremendous vehicle, and it's about 75 games per team.”
GOOD POSITION: Among the major U.S. sports, Sloan said NBA games on RSNs attract the youngest audience. The RSN games represent nearly 60% of all social content discussion, he said, four times ESPN’s NBA games and more than double all network primetime. "From a brand perspective, it's never been healthier," Sloan said. "Our ratings were essentially flat from last year, which is a good sizable number. When everybody else is in decline, it seems like it's a good narrative these days. And just the brand engagement, we're growing at double digits, year over year, every year for the last five years in our total take for NBA coverage. So it's been an important sport for our business." Under Armour is the entitlement partner for opening week; NerdWallet has bought a mid-season and first-round-of-playoffs package; and Chase Freedom card is the entitlement partner for the season-of-giving stretch post-Thanksgiving. Home Team Sports has seen the emergence of brands in non-traditional categories, such as fintech, dabbling in becoming full-fledged sponsors.
