NBA’s playoffs will be tougher sell than ever without its superstars
First ABC gave up Monday Night Football. Now it’s saddled with the NBA Finals. Sometimes a network just can’t catch a break.
Two long months from now the NBA finally will crown a champion, thankfully ending playoffs that last longer than some Hollywood marriages.
For the network executives who laid out the big bucks to carry this rite of spring, it might seem like two years before it’s finally over.
It’s not the basketball itself because, arguably, the product has improved this year. Teams are running more, games are more competitive and no one has beaten up a fan in months.
But in a league built unabashedly around star power, these are playoffs sorely lacking in glitz.
Tune in over the next few months and this is what you’ll see:
No Kobe. No Lebron. No KG.
And, worst of all, no Lakers.
That might not matter to the fans in Phoenix, where the surprising Suns had the best regular-season record, or in Detroit, where the Pistons are peaking at just the right time to defend their championship.
But away from the 16 cities that still have a stake in the outcome, it’s going to be a tough sell to get people to tune in. That’s assuming, of course, that they know which of the three networks airing the playoffs are carrying the games.
For the first time since 1976, the two major television markets – Los Angeles and New York – are without teams in the playoffs. Together, Nielsen Media Research says they have 12.5 million homes with televisions, the same amount as the next five biggest cities put together.
The Knicks haven’t been very good in years, but the Lakers with Kobe, Shaq and their ongoing soap opera had been the team the country couldn’t get enough of.
That showed in last year’s title-clinching game by Detroit, which was the second-highest rated NBA Finals game since the Lakers met Indiana in 1998. To put it in perspective, more than twice as many people watched that game on television as watched the final game between San Antonio and New Jersey the year before.
“It is clear that the Lakers are the team to love or hate, and a playoffs without the Lakers are going to draw lower than one with them,” NBA commissioner David Stern acknowledged this week.
At least Stern and company have had a while to prepare for the absence of Showtime. With Kobe Bryant in command, the Lakers self-destructed early, and by the time the NBA All-Star game was over it was clear they would miss the playoffs for the first time since 1994.
The same was true in Minnesota, where Latrell Sprewell started the season by complaining he couldn’t feed his family on $14.6 million a year, had an altercation with a Minneapolis cop and was suspended for a game for yelling a sexual vulgarity at a female fan during a game.
Even with Kevin McHale on the bench and Kevin Garnett leading the league in rebounds, the same team that gave the Lakers all they could handle in the conference finals wasn’t even good enough to make the top 16 this year.
There was still hope, though. At least Lebron James and the Cavaliers were winning, that is until an online mortgage broker bought the team, fired the coach and mortgaged a once-certain place in the playoffs.
In what might have been the most colossal collapse in Cleveland history – and that’s saying something – the Cavs went 11-16 under new owner Dan Gilbert to miss the playoffs on the final night.
Stern had to be screaming at his television when New Jersey kept the Cavaliers out of the playoffs the other night by beating Boston in its final game. James is not only the star of the future, he’s now legitimately the NBA’s star of the present.
James showed that by averaging 27.2 points and 7.4 rebounds a game. He also had 7.2 assists a game, numbers that should have been higher – except his teammates kept dropping passes. When everything was on the line in the last game of the season, he had an astonishing box score line of 27 points, 14 rebounds and 14 assists in a win over Toronto.
In the end, though, even the next Michael Jordan couldn’t do enough to lead his dysfunctional team into the postseason.
“The kid can do it all,” forward Robert Traylor said, “but he can’t do it all by himself.”
Neither could Kobe or KG, which, ironically, might be saying something for the improving play in the NBA this season. Teamwork is in, suggesting that perhaps both players and coaches learned a lesson in Athens last summer about how basketball really should be played.
That, of course, runs contrary to everything the NBA has stood for in recent years. This is a league that relentlessly has promoted its superstars, only to now find itself hosting a postseason without them.
To be fair, there are some big names still playing. But Tim Duncan, while awfully good, is also awfully boring. Allen Iverson, meanwhile, is likely to exit in the first round, and you can only ride Shaquille O’Neal so far.
Before, the NBA could sell sizzle, stars and feuds. The best it can offer this year is subplots.
Can the Suns continue their Phoenix-like rise to the finals? Can Chicago make it out of the first round after finally making its way back to the playoffs? Which of the three Texas teams will be left standing, and will Shaq gain the ultimate revenge by winning a title in Miami?
Mercifully, the league chopped two days off the first round of the playoffs this year, reducing them to merely 16 days, the same time it takes to hold an entire Summer Olympics. And, thankfully, there’s always the mute button on the remote control to shut off the histrionics from the likes of Stephen A. Smith.
Without the stars the NBA loves to celebrate, though, this could be the longest spring ever.
Tim Dahlberg is a national sports columnist for The Associated Press. Write to him at tdahlberg ap.org