With the men’s basketball gold medal game set to tip off at 2:30 in the morning, at least one writer wonders why one of the marquee events of these 2008 Beijing Olympics has not gotten much prime time attention.
The Dallas Morning News‘ Barry Horn asks, “If NBC still owned NBA television rights, would the network be treating basketball as a stepchild?” Horn notes that NBC aired Friday’s semifinal game between the US and Argentina on tape delay in the Central, Mountain and Pacific time zones. Horn: “NBC deemed airing yet another hour of the out-of-gas Today show more important than live basketball.”
After tonight’s gold medal game, NBC will have aired five basketball games — four men’s games and the women’s gold medal game earlier today. None of the five games will have aired in prime time.
On one hand, that may seem like a slight against a sport NBC was once very identified with. Because the NBA is no longer on NBC, the network has much less incentive to shine the spotlight on the league’s biggest stars. As a result, USA basketball games get less attention from NBC than, say, beach volleyball — which had multiple prime time broadcasts and whose AVP Tour currently has a television deal with NBC.
On the other hand, it is NBC’s prerogative what sports it will focus on during the Olympics. The fact that the network has a deal with beach volleyball and no such attachments with basketball makes the decision easy — put the sport you have the most invested with in prime time. And NBC has not entirely ignored basketball at the Olympics. The network has had features on stars Kobe Bryant and LeBron James, and has given somewhat special treatment to the broadcasts, using the old NBA on NBC theme music and airing the gold medal game live in all time zones.
While it may be somewhat galling that not a single basketball broadcast made it into prime time, consider the fact that Beijing is on a twelve-hour time delay. NBC managed to get swimming events to start in the morning Beijing Time, which is prime time on the East Coast, but a 10 AM start for a basketball game would likely be a harder sell — not the least of which for the players. And if NBC decided to tape delay the basketball games by several hours and air them at night, as has been the practice for track and field events, there would be susbstantially more outcry from fans.
Overall, NBC has done a good job with basketball coverage at the Olympics. While broadcasts have been tape delayed in western time zones, the same can be said of swimming, gymnastics and many other events. At the very least, basketball fans all over the country can watch the gold medal game live — as opposed to Michael Phelps fans on the West Coast, who had to wait three hours to see his record eighth gold medal.
