The NBA is moving up the start times for NBA Finals games for the first time in 20 years.
ESPN announced Wednesday that weeknight NBA Finals games will be scheduled to begin at 8:30 PM ET, a half-hour earlier than the traditional 9 PM start. Sunday Finals games will continue to begin at 8 PM ET, as they have since 2009.
This year marks the first time since 2003 that the NBA has moved up the start time of Finals games. That year, the first of the league’s current media rights deals, each game began at 8:30. After Finals viewership plunged nearly 40 percent to what was (at the time) a 22-year low, the league reverted to the 9 PM start times the year after.
It should be noted that there were many reasons why the 2003 series did so poorly relative to previous years, including the NBA’s sharp reduction in over-the-air exposure that season and an unusually dull Finals matchup of low-scoring, low-wattage teams San Antonio and New Jersey. Even so, it is clear that the league put at least some of the blame on the earlier start times.
Other leagues have tried earlier start times for marquee events, with limited success. Just this past January, college football’s national championship had its earliest start yet — 7:30 PM ET — and delivered a record-low audience. It bears noting that Georgia’s 65-7 margin of victory likely had more to do with that than the early start.
In 2010, Major League Baseball tried a 7 PM ET start for Game 3 of the World Series, which ended up delivering one of the smallest audiences in Fall Classic history at the time. Again, the early start likely had less to do with the low figure than the low-profile matchup (Giants-Rangers).
Much-derided on the East Coast, 9 PM ET starts have long been commonplace for the NBA Finals. Even in the days when weekend Finals games aired in the afternoon, weeknight games still began at 9 PM.
(News from ESPN)
