So no one cares about the NBA, huh?

To say that no one cared when Carmelo Anthony was traded to New York is factually wrong. (Justin Lane/EPA/Landov)

There is a sprouting genre of lockout-related writing that essentially boils down to this: Nobody cares about the NBA, or its cute little lockout, and so the two sides better stop arguing and compromise already, lest the league’s allegedly tiny fan base turn to NASCAR or competitive dancing or whatever. The authors of such writing always include at least one of the following general statements:

• “No one I talk to has even mentioned the NBA lockout!”

• “Nobody pays attention to the NBA until the Christmas Day games!”

• “Nobody pays attention to the NBA until after the Super Bowl!”

• “The NBA might cancel some regular-season games. Who cares? Only the playoffs matter.”

Well, here’s what I think about such arguments:

• They’re mostly about the impossible standard of the NFL, because when people scream that “no one cares about the NBA” what they really mean is that the NFL is much, much more popular than professional basketball in the U.S. This is true, and this is why the Super Bowl line finds its way into so many of these columns. But to say no one cares about the NBA, or that the NBA is not a popular thing in the broader view of pop culture options, is just silly.

Half the league’s teams filled their arenas to 90 percent capacity on average last season. For most teams, between 70 and 90 percent of those seats are the property of season-ticket holders. Those folks will either get refunds or accrue interest for games missed, but I know a bunch of them who (gasp!) would enjoy strolling over to an NBA arena in December and checking out the Suns. And these are just people I know — friends, relatives, acquaintances; there are others who email or send me tweets every day, asking when the season will start. Sure, some season-ticket holders unload their tickets on the secondary market, and that market can be pretty dry on a Wednesday night when the Bucks are in town. But that market can also be robust; talk to the guys at TiqIq, a secondary-market aggregator, and they’ll tell you the Carmelo Anthony trade made the New York market explode in a way they’ve never seen.

In other words, if you haven’t found a single person in life who cares about the resolution of the NBA lockout, you haven’t looked very hard.

Some of these columns actually concede the league is quite popular, and they get around this contradiction by painting that popularity as fragile. They mention the record television ratings the league’s networks saw in the 2010-11 season, the special appeal (or anti-appeal) of the Heat and all the glorious close games that kept us up late in May and June. Nearly six million fans watched Game 1 of the Boston-New York first-round series last season. About 2.5 million fans watched the average TNT regular-season broadcast — one of those “who cares?” games among the endless 82. The most popular teams can draw between 90,000 and 200,000 homes for a typical regular-season game broadcast on local television.

Not all teams enjoy such popularity, of course. Only 12,000 local homes tuned to the average Bobcats game last season, and a few other clubs — Milwaukee, New Jersey and Minnesota, for instance — didn’t do much better. But to say the NBA is unpopular, or that nobody cares about it until the playoffs start, is just factually wrong. If the NFL is “Dancing with the Stars,” a mega-hit and cultural touchstone (and a piece of programming that lasts hours even though the action is contained in mere minutes), then perhaps the NBA is “Parks and Recreation” or “Storage Wars.” It’s not as popular as the most popular sport in the country, but it’s more popular than many other entertainment options — most of which do not contain 82 discrete episodes or ask viewers to pay attention for most of the calendar year.

• Of course more people care about the NBA (and the NHL and Major League Baseball) right before and during the playoffs. You can argue that the NBA’s season is too long, or that allowing 16 of its 30 teams into the postseason devalues the regular season; those are convincing claims, and I’ve addressed them before. The NBA could tweak its format so the regular season matters more, and doing so might goose ratings in November and December. But the NBA will never be the NFL, with such a limited number of games that each one is crucial and, thus, a ratings bonanza. Basketball’s popularity will always crest in May and June, and I’m not really sure why that’s an issue worth wagging a finger at the union and the owners.

• You might think it wouldn’t matter if the NBA canceled the first 30 regular-season games, but you’d be wrong, and you may not really understand how professional basketball works. The 1998-99 season, when the league canceled the first 32 games, was a compressed brick-show in which scoring reached its all-time nadir and teams slogged through back-to-back-to-backs and stretches of five games in seven nights — stretches that either don’t exist in a normal season or are unusual (and unwelcome). Squeezing the season affected the quality of play and reduced the time each team had to experiment, adjust its playbook and develop the sort of chemistry champions require.

And if you don’t think that experimentation and time matters, you’re missing how many of the league’s teams evolve within a season. It took the 2009-10 Suns, conference finalists, about 50 games to find their groove. The Heat’s 2010-11 season was a fascinating study of incremental integration and adjustment — one that continued all the way through the Finals. The Bulls were a defensive juggernaut by Thanksgiving, hinting right away at the style of play they’d use to top the league’s regular-season standings. The Spurs reinvented themselves early by playing at a pace that previous Gregg Popovich teams never approached. The Lakers’ so-so midseason play heralded their postseason demise, and Phil Jackson’s choice to remake the team’s basic defensive principles midstream blew up against Dallas. The Mavericks dramatically altered the way they played offense, a reinvention that required in-game testing, constant lineup experimentation and months of tweaking.

If you don’t tune in until April, you might think players and teams arrive at the postseason looking very much as they did in November. In most cases, you would be wrong, and there are enough fans who delight in watching the evolution of a team as to justify the broadcast of every single NBA game on television.

The “nobody cares!” critics are not totally off-base. They’re just a bit too generalized, which is what happens when you are writing for a broad audience. They’re right that the regular season is irrelevant to most casual fans, that fans now find it distasteful (as they always do) to watch billionaire owners and millionaire players fight over $4 billion in revenue, and that the NBA is not even in the same stratosphere as the NFL, in terms of viewership and overall popularity.

But that doesn’t mean nobody cares, or that the league is in danger of extinction, or that it is some niché sport on the verge of lockout-induced irrelevance.