NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - The playoffs start this weekend for the NBA, which only seems like it stands for "No Broadcasts on ABC."
If you don't have cable or satellite television, you would think the National Basketball Association's top teams are actually the Not Ready For Prime Time Players. No more than a handful of early-round playoff games will be seen on broadcast television.
ABC will show five Sunday afternoon games in the rounds leading up to the finals, starting this weekend. But almost all the early round games will air only ESPN or TNT. In fact, some will be carried only by the team's local broadcasters.
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| Last year's NBA Finals had the lowest ratings in league history. |
Last year, the ratings for the six-game finals fell to a record low, with just 6.5 percent of U.S. homes tuning into the series between the San Antonio Spurs and the New Jersey Nets. That's about a third of the rating the last time Michael Jordan was in the finals, and barely half the audience that watched the championship game of the 2003 NCAA basketball tournament.
The ratings, in fact, were slightly worse than in 1981, when some of the games were shown on tape-delay.
It's clear that the league misses Jordan's supernova star power. And NBA commissioner David Stern blamed last year's ratings on the teams involved.
"Our fans and viewers," he said, "didn't find that particular competition as inspiring as we had hoped they would."
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But it wasn't just the lack of Jordan or the presence of two low-visibility teams that drove down the ratings. The league's decision to keep early round games out of the sight of casual fans must share equal blame.
In 2002, the NBA signed a contract with Walt Disney Co. that gave the league more money, but allowed Disney to air more games on cable networks. Had the league stuck with longtime broadcast partner NBC -- which doesn't have any sports cable outlet -- it would have meant accepting less than offered by Disney, which owns both ABC and ESPN.
But what gives the Super Bowl, the World Series and NCAA tournament their viewership -- and lucrative appeal to advertisers -- is their ability to pull in large number of casual fans, not just the hard-core ones glued to ESPN.
Nothing like a good story
In any tournament, drama in the early games helps build excitement as teams reach later rounds. Since the early round NBA games won't run on broadcast networks, it makes it difficult to capture the attention of the casual fan.
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"Story is a driving force of anything in sports and entertainment. Not having the playoffs play out in front of the large audience as they had done in the past I think was one factor," said Dick Ebersol, the chairman of NBC Sports, when I asked him about the factor in the NBA's ratings woes last year.
Ebersol's critique might be dismissed as the griping of a guy left at the altar. But even Disney executives agree that a key to building interest is to develop story lines during the course of the playoffs.
"There's no better marketing or tool to use than to build momentum from the series themselves," said Mike Pearl, executive producer of ABC Sports.
Last year, ABC did shift some of the games originally intended for cable to the network. But this year, it intends to keep most games on ESPN.
Stern argues that the economics of cable vs. broadcasters means that sports leagues have no choice but to move more and more of the product to cable.
About 85 percent of U.S. homes can watch games on ESPN or TNT. The fact is, if you want to watch most sports on a day-to-day basis rather than just the championships, free television doesn't get you into the game any more.
"Although networks will continue to garner important groupings of fans," Stern said, "the inexorable march to cable is underway."
The march of fans away from the high-profile sporting events is also underway. The league's attempt to grab every possible television dollar now -- rather than take less money in return for a wider audience -- is to blame.
Tens of thousands of fans will not get a chance to learn about Kevin Garnett or the upstart Memphis Grizzlies this year, because they won't get a chance to show their stuff on a truly national stage. And that will make them less likely to tune into games next season and seasons to come.
The networks will continue to hope for a Lakers-Knicks finals to pull in casual fans half-expecting to see Wilt Chamberlain battling Willis Reed. And the league will blame further viewer defections on Michael Jordan's retirement.
The truth is simpler than that. In the long run, the NBA's cash grab from cable is what will cost the league most.
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