This has been a remarkable year across the NBA. The Warriors, once dormant, have returned to the NBA Finals for the sixth time in eight seasons. The Celtics have made it there for the first time with their young nucleus of Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown. Nikola Jokic won his second consecutive MVP.  And yet, based on the press releases the league and its television partners have sent out, no one seems to be flourishing more than the league itself.

After two years of rocky, impugned TV ratings, the NBA is back riding a high, with this month’s Golden State-Boston Finals likely to serve as a crescendo. Every week seems to bring some new accomplishment to tout. Game 7 of the Celtics-Heat series was the most-watched conference finals game in four years. More people watched the first round of these playoffs on ESPN than any postseason since 2014. The first playoff weekend had the biggest audience since 2011. This was the most-viewed regular season on TV since the 2018-19 campaign. Wherever you look, historical accomplishments loom.

For the NBA, this season has been a resounding rebuttal to years of criticism that the league has lost not only viewers, but customers altogether. Some of those maligning the league cited dipping TV ratings. Others used those numbers to make specious and bad-faith arguments about the league after its embrace of the social justice and Black Lives Matter movements of 2020; often those were lobbed by right-wing activists with little interest in the league’s failure or success and more in need of politicizing things so as to have another opponent. That has been harder to do this season as numbers have shot up.

While the NBA can take a ratings victory lap ahead of negotiations for a new media rights deal set to begin in 2025, its return as a TV viewer favorite this season is more complex than its buoyant numbers might declare. Those tell the story of a league that got its groove back, but has also benefited from new viewer counting tools and maybe, at least partially, its dependency on a rejuvenated star and franchise in the Bay Area. The NBA is back, but not all the way to its highs of last decade, and it needed some help.

There is no doubt that the NBA has been revitalized this season. It has minted new superstars in Luka Doncic, Ja Morant, and Tatum; it has old ones like Curry thriving; and others like Giannis Antetokounmpo, Joel Embiid, Nikola Jokic and Kevin Durant that are in their primes. Even without LeBron James playing a full season or the Lakers and Knicks in the playoffs, they had playoff teams in five of the six top media markets and seven of the top 10. The league averaged 1.6 million viewers across its ESPN, ABC, and TNT broadcasts this regular season, the most since it averaged 1.75 million in 2018-19 and up 19 percent on last season.

“There’s no denying the reality,” Ed Desser, a veteran media executive and former NBA Television president, said. “The reality is that the NBA is on a roll. The content is strong and is captivating.”

But as good as the NBA has been this season, its success story couldn’t be told without incorporating a friendly bounce from Nielsen’s new method for collecting viewership numbers. Since September 2020, Nielsen has included out-of-home viewers as part of its tallies, which can account for people watching, say, at bars and restaurants.

That hasn’t always been a boon to networks. Nielsen admitted that it undercounted viewers last year, with one estimate saying it didn’t account for almost 400,000 people every night from May to December of 2021. The company has since claimed to have fixed the issue. A spokesperson for Nielsen said that out-of-home viewing makes up for about 10 percent of the total viewing audience.

“The NBA has definitely rebounded in a real way that cannot just be attributed to Nielsen changing its methodology to include out-of-home viewership,” said Jon Lewis, the founder of Sports Media Watch. “But I also think that when you’re talking about the most-watched postseason since 2014, I think based on the numbers I’ve seen, 2019 was probably still ahead of this year. But there was no out-of-home viewing back then. And I think that makes a difference.”

Ratings have also boomed because of a return to the league’s normal calendar. The end of 2019-20 was played in a bubble in Orlando with no fans. The entire 2020-21 season was off-schedule, starting in December and ending in July.

Those circumstances seemed to hurt NBA games as a consumer product and made them less accessible to fans who wanted to watch. On top of that, fans had their own lives upended by the pandemic.

It all made for gnarly viewership. Half as many people watched the 2020 Finals as they did in 2019. The 2021 Finals were the second-lowest-rated of the last decade.

“Look at what’s been going on the last few years and sports is not immune to that,” Desser said. “Playing the playoffs and the finals in a single location in a bubble is just not nearly as compelling as home crowds and the nature of the product these days. I think part of it is that. I think part of it is people expect the NBA playoffs to be in the spring, not in the summer or fall. There’s a certain kind of cadence in the sports industry. People are ready for particular things at particular times… I think what we’re seeing is both a bounce back to something more closely resembling normalcy and a certain pent-up demand based on what has happened the last couple of years.”

Desser believes the NBA’s jump is a result of the league as a product itself, not the out-of-home viewers. He said there are 10 million fewer cable homes now than there were several years ago, making these TV numbers more impressive because they have come in the face of increased cord-cutting.

There are indicators that show the NBA has returned to its baseline. Google searches for “NBA playoffs” this spring have almost matched 2019 levels. Searches for “NBA” have shown a rebound as well.

The league has also benefited from the Warriors’ return to title contention. Golden State was the highest locally rated team in the league for the sixth time in the last seven seasons. They played in seven of the 12 most-watched games this season. In 2019-20, there were just two Warriors games in the top-70 highest-rated games.

Perhaps it’s not a coincidence that NBA ratings dropped dramatically in the two seasons the Warriors missed the playoffs. They fell in 2019-20 even before the pandemic suspended the season — the same season in which Curry played just five games.

Maybe a healthy and successful Steph Curry was the medicine the NBA needed. That he’s booming just as new stars have also come onto the scene has made for fortuitous timing for the league.

“The numbers that we’re seeing this year put to rest the notion that the numbers of the past two years were an indication of the NBA’s popularity,” Lewis said. “As opposed to an indication of the adverse conditions that the league was facing — all the other leagues were facing as well. So to me, that’s what this year’s preseason ratings indicate. They don’t indicate that the NBA is more popular than ever, or the league is surging to new heights. It indicates to me that the league is certainly back to where it had been. And that the rise of out-of-home means that the kind of numbers you got in 2019 will have this additional audience on top of them that make them look a little bit more formidable than they are.”

(Photo of Jordan Poole and Warriors fans: Noah Graham/NBAE via Getty Images)