As the National Basketball Association (NBA) opens another season, the league is expanding the way it works with creators to grow and popularize basketball.
It’s brought on top influencers such as Twitch streamer Kai Cenat and TikTokker Drew Afualo to mark the start of the 2024-25 season in a glossy trailer, running another edition of its five-versus-five celebrity creator tournament, the Creator Cup Series — and crucially, granting a coterie of creators access to tens of thousands of hours of basketball game footage.
Other sports leagues and organizations such as the PGA and WNSL have recently ramped up their engagement with the creator sector, and the NBA’s move to provide creators with game footage follows a similar initiative launched last year by the NFL.
Game footage is typically a preserve of broadcasters, and without the means or funds to license clips, sports creators have instead looked to explore new formats, such as “watchalongs,” in which users can watch creators narrate and comment on a game in real time without showing live footage. The NBA, though, is granting creators access to 25,000 hours of game footage spanning the last 10 years in basketball, from 2014 to the 2023-24 season.
“The idea here is that if we can empower a very select group on YouTube, it’s going to help us reach new fans globally,” said Bob Carney, svp social and digital content at the NBA. “These creators will become like an extension of the league.” The NBA didn’t say whether creators would be able to use the footage on platforms other than YouTube.
The NBA commissioned an AI software firm, WSC Sports, to index the footage in a way that allows editors to search and select specific plays across the library, which also includes footage of pre and post-game analysis and press conferences as originally broadcast. The NBA is also providing them access to WSC’s AI-enabled video editing suite, according to Carney. Financial terms were not made available.
“I honestly think it’ll elevate content as a whole for basketball,” said Nick Valenta, CEO of sports-focused creative agency Mādin.
“There’s a million amazing stories in the NBA,” he added. “The ability to show the footage, rather than just come up with a clever workaround… [it means the creators] will now be able to [explore] them in a more emotionally impactful way.”
Though it maintains a 200-strong live creator correspondent network similar to that run by the NFL or WNSL, the NBA is initially only sharing the decade of footage with six YouTube creators: Thinking Basketball (599,000 subscribers), Swish Cultures (201,000 subscribers), By Any Means Basketball (478,000 subscribers), CoshReport (503,000 subscribers), MaxaMillion711(413,000 subscribers) and Golden Hoops (1.96 million subscribers).
Carney declined to share details of the NBA’s commercial relationship with each of the creators, but Kevin Esteves, vp, digital content strategy and analytics said the league would continue to “recruit” creators to the program.
The NBA will review content produced with the footage before release, said Esteves. He suggested the creators would be dissuaded from uploading entire games to YouTube, and instead encouraged to produce long-form original content. “The intent is to create content that is what we would consider to be transformative,” he said.
Consumption habits on YouTube, as well as other video-first platforms such as TikTok, have favored longer duration videos in recent years. The NBA’s move to provide creators with more footage is designed to help basketball YouTubers lean into that swing, said Carney.
“[Over 45%] of the consumption that we see on YouTube is coming from television screens, and therefore the content needs to be longer. You need people that can create that longer-form content,” Carney noted, referencing internal YouTube figures on video consumption.
“Being able to stitch content from across an entire decade means that the possibilities are endless,” he added.
There’s plenty in this for the NBA, too. Supporting basketball creators makes the game “more accessible to more people,” said Sarah Gerrish, senior director of influencer and creators at creative agency Movers + Shakers. Creator-made basketball content could help “convert more casual fans of the NBA into more rabid fans of the sport,” she added.
“These creators have [a], unique authenticity that traditional marketing obviously, sometimes lacks,” said Joey Chowaiki, chief operating officer and co-founder at Open Influence, an influencer agency. “By leveraging creators… the NBA can connect on a more personal level and engage with like a new wave of audiences.”
Working to make its audience broader and deeper makes the NBA more attractive to advertisers and sponsors too, of course. Not that it needs much help — the NBA has drawn consistently high TV audiences in recent years, and this week Nike signed a 12 year extension to its deal with the league as its exclusive kit supplier.
Still, this is an example of a sports league fixing the roof while the sun is shining. “When you see organizations like the NBA tapping into the creator economy… it piques a lot of interest,” concluded Chowaiki.
