If you were to look around the internet, you could easily conclude that the NBA has a big problem – it’s boring, or so it is claimed. There are Reddit posts on the topic, a few people have made long, winding Medium articles arguing that case, and NBA stars themselves, such as Draymond Green, have made the claim to the mainstream media. This tends to get put into the mixer of social media, with fans opining that the league is in big trouble. Naturally, they also pine for a previous age when the NBA was better.
Yet, is this really true? While there are some areas of concern, such as ‘tanking,’ i.e., the practice of teams losing in order to get a better draft position, there is also empirical evidence that fans are enjoying the current NBA season. Fans vote with their feet, so it’s worth noting that the NBA is on its best three-year stretch of arena attendances, and they also vote with their television remotes, so it might surprise some to learn that TV audiences were up 16% for the 2025/26 regular season. In short, the data does not match the sentiment, at least on the internet.
The NBA just had its best three year attendance stretch of all-time:
— 22.18M fans
— 18,108 fans per game
— 97% arena capacity
— 11 teams with sell out seasonsIgnore the noise. The league is growing. pic.twitter.com/meMqBTmI3N
— Legion Hoops (@LegionHoops) April 14, 2026
The Golden Age Is Never the Present Age
This is often the way with sports. There can be a yearning among fans for a golden age, and it is rarely the present age. Often, there is an argument that the modern game lacks characters. People will shrug at seeing Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Nikola Jokic fighting it out in the NBA MVP betting markets and think it’s nothing like Magic and Jordan in the late 80s or Kobe and Duncan in the 2000s. Yet, you can be sure that 15-20 years from now, (some) fans will be looking back and saying that this period of James, Curry, Harden, SGA, Durant, Giannis, Jokic, Doncic, and others was stacked with brilliance and personality.
This is certainly not limited to basketball. Over in England, there is a mass longing for a previous era of Premier League soccer, which they colloquially tag as “Barclays,” named after the league’s sponsor. The “Barclays” period was the late 1990s and 2000s, and to hear it told today, it was so much better. The same arguments come up as with the NBA: More characters, more passion and ultimately, more exciting games.
Nostalgia Plays Tricks On Our Senses
Might we argue that this is not a sports thing, but societal? People tend to think that the best period of anything coincides with their youth. Talk to late millennials, and they will give you a dissertation on why the 1990s were the best for just about everything – movies, politics, economics and, indeed, sports – yet is it a coincidence that this just happens to be their teenage years?
Humans are, by their very nature, nostalgic. With sports, nostalgia tends to make us accentuate the good and forget the bad. Not every Michael Jordan-led Chicago Bulls game in the 1990s was a thrill fest, and people tend to forget that the decade was filled with slow-paced, low-scoring “dead-ball” games. People now talk about the bruising physicality of the game in the 1990s, something of a riposte to the “soft” players of today, but, at the time, it could be frustrating and, ultimately, boring. As mentioned, there are flaws in modern NBA – and every other sport – but any claim of being the worst era is highly overhyped. It’s just human nature.
