Tony Khan Reveals How the NBA Playoffs Proved to Be a Headache for Him in 2022: “I Don’t Need to Do Any of the Tricks I Used Last Year”

Last year, AEW faced quite a trouble while gaining audience viewership on cable. The highest rating for the 18-49 demographic was 0.40 with 969k viewers on the June 1 edition of AEW Dynamite. All other show ratings for 2022 were lower than this mark. One of the major reasons for this could be the fact that NBA playoffs were stealing a considerable amount of viewers from the Jacksonville-based promotion. AEW shows and NBA playoffs fell on the same night, so this reason sounds logical. Also, he had to navigate the same problem last year with his biggest pay-per-view Double or Nothing.

Recently, Tony Khan addressed this matter and opened up about the challenges he had to face last year due to the NBA playoffs.

Tony Khan doesn’t believe in boring the audience with long stretched shows

Khan recently had an AEW Double or Nothing Media Call. During the call, he revealed he usually tries to wrap his shows within four hours. However, last year, he had to switch up things a little in order to mitigate the viewership blow from the NBA playoffs.

He said, “I am also sensitive to the length of the shows, trying to keep all the pay-per-views under four hours whenever possible. Thankfully, there is not going to be an NBA player off game seven this year so I don’t need to do any of the tricks I used last year to lengthen the show that frankly whether anyone like them or not they work.”

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He didn’t like to extend the show’s length unnecessarily. Still, he had to do it last year to help the numbers. Luckily, the plan worked to some extent as the May 19, 2022 edition of Double or Nothing PPV had a 155,000 buy rate despite Golden State Warriors and Dallas Mavericks colliding in the Western Conference NBA finals.

Along with this, he used another trick to grasp the audience’s attention. Let’s find out what it was.

Save the best for the last, Khan’s mantra

During the media call, Khan revealed that to deal with the persistent viewership issue, he devised another plan. The plan was to keep the best matches on the card saved for the last. This helped to draw the audience to the show as they switched to watching pro wrestling programming after the NBA show got over.

The last three matches in the 2022 AEW Double or Nothing were: (1) Jericho Appreciation Society vs. Bryan Danielson, Jon Moxley, Eddie Kingston, Santana and Ortiz (2) Jurassic Express vs. Ricky Starks and Powerhouse Hobbs vs. Keith Lee and Swerve Strickland (3) “Hangman” Adam Page vs. CM Punk.

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