Sports media behemoth ESPN has been taking some tough knocks in the press and on Wall Street lately for losing cable subscribers to cord-cutting and laying off more than 100 editorial staffers.

But, like an impassioned coach’s speech in the locker room at halftime, ESPN Chairman John Skipper made a case Tuesday for the continued vitality of his business during the network’s upfront sales presentation to advertisers at the Minskoff Theatre in New York.

“ESPN is responding to change and we’re making changes from the most dramatic position of strength,” he said.

Even with fewer subscribers, Skipper noted that ESPN reached 210 million viewers last fall, a record for the channel, and saw its prime-time ratings increase 15 percent in the first quarter of 2017 compared with the same period a year ago. (The ratings reflect the number of people who are actually watching ESPN; not everyone who gets the channel in their cable bundle will necessarily watch it.)

Skipper got the good news out to the audience of ad execs who have probably heard the bad news that has haunted the Walt Disney unit in recent years. A growing number of Americans are ditching cable and satellite subscriptions to watch video online. As the network that commands the highest subscriber fee in the TV business — an estimated $8 a month per subscriber — every cord-cutter represents lost revenue.

ESPN has lost an estimated 9 million subscribers just since 2013. Wall Street analysts have highlighted the subscription losses after every Disney earnings report, even as the company’s stock continues to perform well.

Skipper countered that ESPN is making up some of those losses through “over-the-top” TV offerings that provide streaming video channel subscriptions via the Internet.