Friday Dump 🥟 - Unpopular NBA Finals, SMU treasure chest, BKLYN go hard

It’s getting hot in here for the Friday Dump 🥟 

Each Friday, we’ll breakdown 3 sports business stories that have caught our eye throughout the week. They will be assembled in the following format:

🔴 - Stories that make us stop, think, and question.

🟡 - Stories with a hint of risk and unpredictability.

🟢 - Stories that make us feel good to go and empowered.

So take off all your…WOAH just keep reading.

🔴 NBA might have a Finals viewership problem. Just imagine you’re Commissioner Adam Silver, your apex set of games just got wrapped up, the Boston Celtics were just crowned champions and became the winningest franchise in NBA history, you sit down with your morning coffee to review the numbers, and BOOM! it hits you. ABC’s coverage of the Celtics’ five-game victory over the Dallas Mavericks averaged ~11.3M viewers (down 3% from last year’s five-game Nuggets-Heat series. It’s exactly what you want to see before a high-profile negotiation, right? 😬…wrong. To break it down even further…

• The Mavs’ one win of the series in Game 4 was the least-watched Finals game in the traditional June slot since 2007. Now, to be fair, the Mavs were blowing out the Celtics basically the whole game and won by nearly 50 points…which doesn’t sound like enticing television viewing.

• But, Game 1 also didn’t rate well. And while Game 2 saw slightly better numbers, the 9.6M viewers in that game was about half what ABC/ESPN drew for its broadcast of the women’s college basketball championship earlier this year…shout out to the ladies!

🟡 ACC Pay Raise. If there’s one thing the SMU Mustangs are guilty of, its that they love their football. So much so they received the first and only “Death Penalty” by the NCAA back in 1987 for "under the table" payments to players and their families to entice them to come play at the university in the late-1970’s and early 1980’s (seems pretty silly now, doesn’t it?). These days, it’s a little different. Enter from stage left: a new fundraising record! The Mustangs’ athletic department announced this week it raised a record of $159M during the 2023–24 fiscal year. Why is this happening? Well…

• SMU is 1 of 3 new additions to the ACC (along with Stanford and the University of California, Berkeley) as conference realignment continues to infect the country.

• And most of these funds were secured during the week following the announcement that the school would move to the ACC.

  • $100M poured in during that week, largely thanks to a new group called the First Week Society, which launched a $125M campaign.

• It’s a much needed move by the school because of the financial risk that comes with moving to the ACC.

  • SMU won’t receive any media rights revenue for 9 years; Stanford and Cal are giving up 70% of media rights revenue for 7 years. In return, these schools receive “Power 5” status (ooooo ahhhh! The power of branding 🤩).

  • SMU received $9M from their previous conference (American Athletic Conference) from revenue distributions in 2022–23.

    • That equates to about the same amount the school will receive from the ACC’s non-media revenue.

  • Fortunately, the Dallas boosters are going to cover a large part of the media rights gap, paying out $200M over those 9 years (~$22M annually which comes out to less than the $30M current member schools get).

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🟢 Brooklyn’s cash injection. Are you telling us Brooklyn’s back? We know Jay-Z couldn’t be more pumped. Because on Wednesday it was announced, Julia Koch has an agreement to buy a 15% stake in BSE Global, the parent company of the Brooklyn Nets, New York Liberty and the Barclays Center. The deal puts the valuation of the company at ~$6B. Hmm Koch, does that name sound familiar? She’s the widow of David Koch, a billionaire who ran Koch Industries. He became one of the richest men in the United States and was a prominent donor to the Republican Party.

• Even though it’s a great cash injection for the company and for the Nets and Liberty as teams, it doesn’t move the needle a whole lot as the parent company is controlled by Joe Tsai and Clara Wu Tsai (co-founder of Alibaba Group).

• It comes at a pretty decent time as NBA valuations on the whole are up 50% in the past 3 years and the WNBA has seen strong commercial growth particularly during this current season.

• In April, the Barclays Center was the highest grossing arena in the world, according to Billboard.