As the professional sports world begins to plan for life following the COVID-19 pandemic, fans are set to experience unprecedented overlap between several professional sporting leagues.
The NHL, NBA, and MLS have all announced plans to resume play in the coming months, with July as the target start date. The MLB is expected to soon follow the other leagues. With those plans will come newfound competition for viewership between several leagues, specifically during prime-time. Some will even have events that contend with NFL games at the beginning of the 2020 season.
The 2020 NBA Draft was originally scheduled to take place on Thursday, June 25. Now they’ve rescheduled the event for October 15. What else is taking place on October 15th? The Kansas City Chiefs Week 6 matchup with the Buffalo Bills on “Thursday Night Football.” It’s a matchup between two teams that are expected to be extremely competitive within the AFC conference. It could even be a potential preview of a future game to occur in the AFC playoffs.
Why is this significant, though? In 2019, the Chiefs were part of four of the top-50 TV broadcasts in the United States. Three of those games came during the NFL’s national broadcast windows and they each had over 20 million viewers. Now, Kansas City is coming off of a Super Bowl title and features one of the most exciting rosters in football, headlined by star QB Patrick Mahomes. They’ve proved themselves to be must-watch television. The NBA is prepared to have their draft go head-to-head with one of the Chiefs’ five prime-time matchups in 2020.
The NBA Draft already struggled to attract viewership in 2019, with an average of just 3.09 million viewers. Chiefs fans shouldn’t worry about the NBA Draft attracting viewers from their Week 6 meeting with the Bills. But the NBA, they should be very worried. They could be looking at an all-time low in viewership for their draft.
