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By Christopher Witflee
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With little incentive from an apathetic public, the playoffs in professional hockey and basketball are off to a drowsy start. Their problem is the same: Neither is good TV.
That should be a joke, of course.
Good basketball is great TV. But the NBA doesn't have that now, so it's working furiously to make good TV out of bad basketball. The result has been a lingering disposition of the casual sports fan not to take the league seriously.
David Stern's reputation as a promotional genius is now to be staked on ideas like miking the coaches so the viewers can get an inside look at an NBA huddle! "Get somebody open!" says the coach. "We have 24 seconds to shoot!"
Recognizing that the players and teams were two-dimensional entities with no story to tell, the NBA sought to enforce team strategy as made-for-TV human drama. So much did the NBA want to undercut its seriousness, putting up the game's inner workings as schtick, that the league imposed heavy fines on coaches who didn't cooperate.
Facing team fines of $100,000 for refusing to comply, coaches like Toronto's Butch Carter and Seattle's Paul Westphal declined. These coaches could go down as the heroes of the season, though Carter made up for it by creating a ridiculous story of his own, initiating legal action against New York Knicks forward Marcus Camby for calling him a "liar."
Carter, who has accused Bobby Knight of using racial slurs, gave much-needed fire to the Eastern Conference series featuring Vince Carter, over whom Stern is pulling out his hair because he plays for Toronto and his hometown TV ratings don't ring up at NBC. The elder Carter withdrew his lawsuit and tried to play it off as a clever coaching maneuver designed to draw attention away from his team. It didn't work. The Knicks swept Toronto in three games, so the Raptors and both Carters are out of the playoffs.
Likewise, Stern suspended all the fines against coaches who refused microphones after the policy was uniformly blasted in the print media. Instead, the NBA opted for boom mikes near the huddles. Naturally, the print media has some interest in eliminating NBC's intrusion in the huddles, but coaches pushed the case.
Even in a public enterprise like pro basketball, the contestants must be able to maintain some pretense of privacy. Each team needs some sphere it can call its own so the players and coaches can relate in a meaningful way without putting on a show.
As far as the NBA is concerned, though, the show supercedes the players and the game. Nobody wants to watch the games, because the teams don't matter to anyone. And no one wants to watch the players, because they're guys like Latrell Sprewell, Allen Iverson and Shaquille O'Neil, none of whom much appeals to Wonder Bread America.
The NBA's Good Guys are Carter, Kevin Garnett and Tim Duncan, none of whom is near an American media kingdom or the NBA Finals. Carter already is finished. Duncan won the championship last year, but he's injured this spring and the San Antonio Spurs might not last long enough without him to allow his return.
Garnett's Nike commercials have cast him with a sense of humor, and there's no denying his talent. But he's not going to the June stage unless his Minnesota Timberwolves can beat the Portland Trail Blazers, Utah Jazz and Los Angeles Lakers.
The Lakers tore off some impressive winning streaks and the coach, Phil Jackson, has the credibility to harness the talent. But it's still hard to like the Lakers. O'Neil is playing his best basketball ever, the Lakers are becoming the big-market colossus the league has needed, and it's disturbing. Why couldn't the Lakers play for Del Harris or Kurt Rambis? Why did they need a coach who'd proven he could win the championship before they set out to prove it on their own? It's not like they've lacked the raw ability to do it.
The other Western cities excited about the playoffs don't have many televisions. The defending league champions, the Spurs, face the playoffs knowing their day in the sun might have passed them by. The Lakers' emergence has taken a lot of the bite from their championship defense, and it's still not certain Duncan won't sign elsewhere.
After last spring's early exit, the Utah Jazz aren't so sure Karl Malone and John Stockton can push them through two rounds, let alone the rest of the way. But if Utah makes it to a second round against Portland, the playoffs will really begin. Portland, up and coming a year ago, remains the only team given a decent chance of beating the Lakers, despite being surpassed by them.
Many believe the NBA title will be contested whenever the Lakers and Trail Blazers meet. But Utah or San Antonio can keep it from happening.
At least the Western Conference will be a drama. The Eastern Conference, every bit as wide open, is little anticipated because no one believes the winner can beat Portland or Los Angeles. No one is clearly the best or worst of the lot. Any one of them could be taken down by Sacramento, the bottom seed in the West.
But we're looking pretty far into the future, especially since the NBA decided to space out playoff games by as many as six days in the first round. So desperate is the NBA to maximize its TV draw that it's ensured that every first round game can be seen on NBC, TNT or TBS without conflict. Realizing sports fans would ignore the NBA playoffs if they could, the NBA is trying to make sure they can't.
It could take two weeks to knock off the NBA's first round and, if those two weeks aren't good, NBC's plot writers will have their hands full trying to make a compelling story out of the Knicks vs. the Hornets, or whoever. It goes without saying NBC wants the Knicks and the Lakers in the NBA Finals. Whether the rest of America wants it remains to be seen.
The NHL has its own set of problems that have driven away fans for the past few years. The hockey playoffs used to be the most thrilling, minute by minute, in all sports, particularly for fans who had a dog in the fight.
Today, though, playoff hockey has gone into such tight checking, and the goal-tending is so good, that a 2-1 game passes for a slugfest. Each game therefore has fewer ebbs and flows and the action doesn't fly the way it used to.
Furthermore, with all the expansion and movement of franchises to the south and west, the teams have little identity. Of the Original Six NHL teams, only Toronto and Detroit made the playoffs. As is the case in the NBA, the action in the NHL is out west, so markets that have traditionally carried hockey to the national media have been silent.
And the best team, St. Louis, couldn't even withstand a first-round challenge from the bottom seeded team in the West, San Jose. So the West will come down to a meeting of Detroit and Dallas, who between them have owned the Stanley Cup the last few seasons. Whoever wins takes on whoever wins in the East, which won't matter.
It's quite unusual for both the NBA and the NHL to be going through these changes in power structure at the same time. For nearly two decades, since the NBA championship started going back and forth between Magic Johnson and Larry Bird, there has always been a more or less peaceful transition to the new champion, which earned its stripes by progressing slowly through the playoffs year by year.
The NBA lost Michael Jordan, the NHL lost Wayne Gretzky and, like the NFL, which lost John Elway, their championships have been thrown wide open. It's great for hard-core fans, but no sport maximizes revenues on hard-core fans.
Unless some kind of larger real drama forms in the next month, the TVs will be off when the new champs are crowned.
