Why Watch the Los Angeles Lakers?

On Thursday, J. J. Redick, the coach of the Los Angeles Lakers, was asked about the N.B.A.’s decline in ratings, a topic that has led to hand-wringing in basketball circles. Ratings of N.B.A. games on ESPN were down twenty-eight per cent compared with last year, and nineteen per cent on all networks, in November—just months after the league and several networks signed a seventy-six-billion-dollar rights deal.