Miami Heat Not Only Reason For NBA TV Ratings Soaring

When LeBron James decided to team up with Chris Bosh and Dwyane Wade in South Beach, it was fair to assume that more people would watch Miami Heat games on TV. In a move to try to account for this assumption, the NBA, ESPN and TNT took the drastic step to put the Heat on national television 34 times over the course of the year. I know, shocking, right?

So far, those efforts have paid off, in that ESPN ratings for Heat games are up 69 percent from last year. But if you think the Heat are solely responsible for the NBA's TV ratings success this year, you'd be mistaken. Television ratings for all ESPN and TNT games are up 30 percent from last year, and eight combined Heat games on the two networks don't account for that. Even if you take away the Heat's five ESPN games (Orlando, at Orlando, Phoenix, at Golden State, at New York), the network's ratings are up 23 percent from last year. So it's clearly not just about the Heat. It's as much about the success of other teams too, like the Knicks, Celtics, Spurs and Lakers, among others.