Do NBA fans root for trades and roster moves more than their own teams?

So many rumors, so much trade/free agency talk before and during the 2019 NBA All-Star break. Can we just get back to basketball?

I don’t know about you, but I’m getting sick of all the 👀 tweets in response to anything that could suggest player movement this summer. Granted, it’s exciting and driving league interest through the roof, which is great. I’m just ready to get back to focusing on the thing that makes me sit down and watch over 100 NBA games every year: The play on the court.

I guess I’m feeling the fatigue a little extra since the Boston Celtics are seemingly at the center of all NBA rumors. Whether it’s the Anthony Davis saga, which has reached unparalleled levels of media coverage, or the Kyrie Irving-Kevin Durant bromance, most Celtics fans have thoughts of upending their roster every other day. A roster many of us were confident could win the championship this year. Some of us are still confident in that, some of us not, but the constant speculation is exhausting.

Sometimes I wonder if we root for trades and new signings more than the teams themselves, contender or not.

I came across an interesting article from John Karalis of MassLive.com yesterday. It wasn’t anything too long, just an update of where the NBA’s TV ratings are this season compared to last year and specifically how local ratings have trended for the Celtics.

It said TV ratings on NBC Sports Boston have dropped 27 percent from last season for Celtics games. This isn’t a bombshell development for NBCSB, because last year’s spike was unprecedented, but Karalis raises an interesting point.

"An SBJ story a year ago noted Boston’s ratings as the league’s biggest success story heading into the All Star break. Boston’s ratings were up 82 percent, so the comparative 27 percent drop is still part of a huge jump in the ratings since the Kyrie Irving trade."

Ratings jumped after the Celtics acquired Irving from the Cavaliers, but if you remember correctly, and I assume you do, the Celtics only retained four players from the 2016-17 roster going into last season. Gordon Hayward and Jayson Tatum were other major additions as Al Horford, Marcus Smart, Terry Rozier and Jaylen Brown were the only players left from Boston’s run to the Eastern Conference Finals.

Entering the 2018-19 campaign, the Celtics’ only additions were Brad Wanamaker and Rob Williams. Expectations were sky high, and Boston hasn’t lived up to them on the court. There’s still a lot of basketball to be played, but viewership has dropped. Not only has viewership dropped, but because of the Celtics playing below what fans expected of them and what they expected of themselves, the cry for trades and roster reshuffling has amplified.

I’ve worked in the sports blog/sports media industry for over two years, and I can tell you it takes about two weeks to figure out the kinds of stories readers click on the most. We can write as many insightful, well thought out articles about the play on the court as we want, but one “Potential trade packages” story and the views go through the roof.

Marcus Smart’s insertion into the starting lineup and development as a leader saving the Celtics

Ryan Eggers goes in depth on how special Marcus Morris has been this year shooting the ball

What the Celtics’ heavy reliance on Kyrie Irving could mean this season

All the stories above were focused on what is tangible about the Celtics. Articles that could be used in a discussion on how the Celtics could get out of their mid-season struggles because, at the end of the day, this team has a chance to win a title. Those stories did not perform well. I can’t get into specifics, but the trade articles listed below had 29-times more views than the basketball analysis above.

What a Kevin Durant trade would look like for the Celtics

What the Celtics could offer for Anthony Davis

Potential trade packages for Terry Rozier

The trade pieces were hypothetical and fun to write and think about, but it’s viewership discrepancies like this that begin to erode the quality of our discussions about this incredible game. I’m not saying the trade articles are worthless, I think in some capacity they are important to understanding what must happen for a deal to be executed. But it’s getting out of hand, and I just want to talk about hoops.

This is also why more online content, even outside of sports, is suffering. Traffic drives revenue for websites, and as readers continue to ignore quality content for stuff that’s designed to generate an over-the-top reaction, writers are almost forced to produce inferior work just to make ends meet. You wouldn’t want people like Skip Bayless to get opportunities over the likes of Zach Lowe and Jacki MacMullen, would you?

Sports talk is supposed to be fun. I’m not trying to be the police of what you end up reading, but hopefully, you can understand when the fun of sports talk goes away when some of us want to talk about how much better Jayson Tatum has gotten at being a playmaker, or how good Al Horford is at finding the open man when teams double him and the majority of you are playing NBA 2K MyGM in your head.