NBA rebound is hardly a slam dunk - Variety

League coming off record ratings lows in '07

Source: Variety
By: John Dempsey

As the National Basketball Assn. wraps up the first week of a new season, Charles Barkley, the boisterously opinionated former NBA star and TNT studio commentator, says the fans he's talked to in the past few weeks are more interested in hot teams and star players than in the scandals that have touched the league in the off-season, like a gambling ref and Isiah Thomas' misogyny.

And that's a good thing for a league coming off record ratings lows for its finals last June.

"People are asking me how well the Boston Celtics are going to do with Kevin Garnett and Ray Allen," Barkley said last week, speaking informally with a group of reporters. "They want to know what's going to happen with Kobe Bryant," the disgruntled star who says he's fed up with his Los Angeles Lakers and wants to be traded.

Joining Barkley in the same briefing, David Levy, president of Turner Sports, said referee Tim Donaghy's guilty plea for conspiring with gamblers who bet on games is an isolated incident, and won't affect the ratings on TNT and ESPN, the networks that carry most NBA contests.

And not all scandals are created equal. The jury's conviction of the Knicks' Thomas for improper advances toward a Madison Square Garden executive is not comparable in gale force to the ref scandal, says Mike Trager, sports consultant and former head of Clear Channel TV. "The harassment suit is not an NBA problem, not a basketball problem," he adds, "but a symptom of the poor management of the Knicks."

Despite the lowest Nielsen numbers ever in 2006-07 for an NBA Finals (when San Antonio beat overmatched Cleveland in a four-game sweep), Stern boasts that the NBA has contracts worth more than $8 billion in license fees with ESPN/ABC and TNT for the next nine years, and that the number of league sponsors has shot up to record levels.

From what David Carter, director of the Sports Business Institute at USC, calls "the macro perspective," the ref scandal is scarcely a blip. "The league is fundamentally sound," he says. "I can't think of a single reason not to be bullish about the game."

One specific reason to be bullish, says Robert Tuchman, founder and president of TSE Sports & Entertainment, is the emergence of the Celtics as a contender for the first time in many years. For their NBA-preview issues last week, the covers of three leading sports magazines (Sports Illustrated, the Sporting News and ESPN: The Magazine) all featured Paul Pierce posing with new Celtic teammates Garnett and Allen.

Still, no matter what, the general trend of the NBA's television ratings will be down, says Ed Desser, head of his own sports consultancy and a former top official of the NBA.

"People are getting the games on websites, TiVos, video-on-demand and cell phones," Desser says, calling these additional ways of watching games "digital assets." The NBA is already plunging in, he concludes, prepared "to create a whole new business."