My Magic are out of the playoffs again, so I am officially down to a summer full of Royals baseball and Sporting KC soccer. For those of you unfamiliar with MLS, “SKC” currently has the worst record in the league. Yes, I live in one of the ten most miserable sports cities in America. Being that Kansas City only had an NBA team for the first two years of my life, I have tried to live vicariously through another sports town, and have been a long time fan of the Orlando Magic. Their latest playoff exit hurts particularly bad as the franchise moves closer and closer to an eerie case of déjà vu when the best big man in the league heads west. To make matters worse, I wasn’t able to see the last two games of the series because they were on NBA TV.
I used to think this was the best commissioner in sports.
Showing playoff games on a niche network, much less elimination basketball, is simply bush league. In a time when the NBA is poised to make huge strides on the king of American sports while they squabble over how to divide their success, David Stern and company completely drop the roundball. All the NBA had to do was put the most competitively balanced playoffs I can ever remember on display for all of the country to see, but instead, they put them on NBA TV.
This is not the first year the NBA has shown playoff games on NBA TV, but it seemed particularly bad this year with multiple elimination games being shown on the network. These games included game 5 of the Grizzlies v Spurs series and games 5 and 6 of the Hawks v Magic series.
The team with the best record in the conference while they are on the ropes? In the midst of arguably the biggest NBA upset of all time?
Back-to-back elimination games featuring the NBA runner-up from two years ago and the reigning defensive player of the year?
What year is this again?
The NBA needs to at least contract the ability to flex these games ala the NFL’s Sunday Night Football agreement with NBC. Speaking of a league that does it right, all seven rounds of the NFL Draft could be seen on ESPN and/or the NFL Network. Don’t have cable? They could also be seen online at NFL.com and/or espnnetworks.com. Let me restate this. This weekend, you can see players that you have never heard of, that have never set foot on an NFL field, get drafted in the seventh round, into a league that may or may not play this year…. in four different places. But unless you had NBA TV (or live in the home markets), you did not see the Magic get eliminated from this year’s playoffs.
Even the amateurs are doing it better. Just two months ago, every single NCAA men’s tournament game could be seen, in their entirety, on one of four networks and/or, once again, streamed online at cbssports.com. A couple of NBA playoff games were shown on ESPN3.com, which explains their 281% year over year growth in round one viewership, but game 6 of the Hawks v Magic series was nowhere to be found.
Sure, I could have crept around and found some shoddy justin.tv feed like I do for NFL preseason games, but I just feel dirty after watching sports on there. So I gave the NBA TV companion at NBA.com a shot, but found it so far behind the score updates on the bottom line, that I quickly gave up on the NBA’s coverage altogether. I ended up turning to the trusty Twitterverse for second by second updates. In between updates, I had a great time reading opinions from hundreds of fans sharing my frustration:
@DGreen41: #NBATV you are awful back to back nights of elimination basketball I cant watch #Joke #WhatsThePoint #TNT #DroppingTheBall
@scottpj13: {word I cant say} #NBATV WHY IS GAME SIX ON THIS STUPID NETWORK I DON’T GET? #HAWKS
There were also lots of comments regarding biased NBA TV announcers and poor video feeds, and my personal favorite (and the inspiration behind the title of this post):
@SchroederJon: The NBA: Where you can’t see it happens. #NBATV
Is this what the NBA wants? Fans mocking their coverage during the NBA’s most marketable portion of the season? I also have to believe the league is losing millions in ad revenue by opting to show these games on NBA TV. In the end, TNT ended up showing the final 8.2 seconds of the Magic’s season.
8.2 seconds.
Is this the rodeo or elimination playoff games in the National Basketball Association?
Signed,
Ryan Sleeper+, Online Sports Marketing Guy
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