The NBA’s biggest stars will shine bright on Christmas Day with a slate of five national game broadcasts. A tradition since 1947, Christmas Day is one of the most heavily viewed days of the NBA regular season.
In 2015, December 25 was the most valuable day of the regular season for sponsors. This isn’t all that surprising when you consider that the games reached 28.8 million U.S. viewers and was the subject of just under 1 million Tweets.
As in Christmases past, this year is poised to be one of the biggest days for professional basketball in television audience size, value to sponsors and social chatter. The 2016 NBA on Christmas Day schedule is packed with popular players and teams. The MVPs of the last eight years will be on the court, and six of the top 10 teams by fan base size are playing (Chicago Bulls, Los Angeles Lakers, Cleveland Cavaliers, New York Knicks, Boston Celtics and Golden State Warriors).
One of the day’s big games will see the Warriors and Cavaliers facing each other for the first time since game seven of the NBA Finals. While we’ll have to wait and see how these two teams play on court, N-Score—a syndicated solution that assesses the casting and endorsement potential of over a thousand celebrities (including actors, personalities, musicians and athletes)—shows the teams’ star players LeBron James and Stephen Curry pretty evenly matched.