Netflix is going full throttle on its NFL Christmas GameDay package this year, relegating the usually celebrated NBA Christmas Day slate to an afterthought.

While it may seem like a one-off or some insignificant blip to the average sports fan who’s just excited for some fun football to go with their holiday ham, longtime ESPN and HBO host Bomani Jones is sounding the alarm for the NBA.

To Jones, the NFL taking over Christmas is bigger than just competing for sports fans’ attention. The move could take away the one place that basketball still had a real connection to American life.

“The thing that gets me about the NFL doing this (is) again, they’re playing a game on a Wednesday, which I just think is so gratuitous and extra,” Jones said this week on The Right Time with Bomani Jones. “These teams cost billions of dollars, so especially these new owners, they’re not leaving any money on the table now. But I think this is actually a bigger deal for the NBA. We just kind of laugh it off that they’re doing this, but one thing the NBA really doesn’t have, and honestly at this point I guess the NFL is the only sport that truly has this, is a feeling that it is attached to America by way of tradition.”

Since the second year of the NBA’s existence in 1947, the league has played games on Christmas. As far back as the 1990s, the games routinely drew between 5 and 8 million viewers. In 2023 as the NFL tried its Christmas experiment for the first time with a trio of games across CBS, Fox and ABC, the NBA saw its worst Christmas viewership ever.

If that trend continues (and why wouldn’t it?), Jones fears the NBA losing a real tie to its fans and potential fans.

“For a significant portion of America, it was we [celebrate Christmas] and we watch basketball,” Jones said. “Over the years, it just becomes the thing you do. And it’s just like, damn, it don’t feel like Christmas unless we got basketball … now what you do on Christmas is about to be watch football.”

The Christmas theft is just a high point of the NFL’s nonstop growth. Jones compared football’s ubiquity in America to hockey in Canada, in that there is hardly any room for any other sport these days.

While the NFL’s younger, richer, more capitalistic owners are well within their rights to expand the calendar, it makes it that much harder for sports media and fans to look away.

“We used to have room for other stuff,” Jones said. “The NFL has eaten all the other sports, and it feels like that wasn’t really necessary.”

Now, Americans are one click on their smart TVs away from a football extravaganza on Dec. 25, featuring Beyonce, Mariah Carey and two great matchups on the gridiron. And it will probably always be like that, from now on.

[The Right Time with Bomani Jones on YouTube]