NBA Labor Dispute, Casual Fan's TV Viewing Choices and Pro Basketball's Future

N.B.A. Season in Peril as Players Reject Offer details the latest breakdown in negotiations between the owners and basketball players. Suffice it to say that lots of posturing continues on each side, and whether most of the regular season is played or not is in question. See also NBA Talks Collapse, Head to Court.

Meanwhile, the parties are making the most serious financial mistake of taking their all important TV advertising package and casual fan base for granted. As entertainers whose careers last but a few years, the players especially should know better than to engage in such a dangerous game at the season's outset.

With respect to the TV networks, the current NBA labor dispute provides an opportunity to save "early season" money while taking time to reconsider the cost-benefit aspects of possible alternative programming compared to the current NBA arrangement.

The really valuable network time for airing NBA games occurs during the summer playoffs when TV networks are able to introduce their upcoming fall programming to a strong and heavily male audience of NBA playoff watchers. To me that indicates the casual fan, at the margin, is worth much more to TV sponsors than is the diehard fan.

So who really cares about what's happening in the NBA right now, other than the players, owners, stadiums and diehard fans? Hardly anybody, and certainly not the casual fan.

As with any labor dispute involving a work stoppage, the pressure now will build steadily on the parties to that dispute. It's their money at risk, since the fight is occurring during what would have been the season's beginning weeks or months, as the case may be.

In other words, having a work stoppage at the beginning of the season is a costly time indeed to have a labor fight. In the meantime, the advertising dollars and salaries are burning and won't be forthcoming unless and until play commences, whenever that may be.

The Casual NBA Fan Is Half Out the Door deals with the financially all important casual, as opposed to diehard, fan. The article says this about the ongoing lockout's likely impact on the NBA's casual fan:

"And the more the lockout drags on, the more the casual fan slip, slip, slips away.

Last year's NBA season was seductive to casual fans. It began with the summer-long LeBron James free-agency drama, which was goofy and maddening but transformed into an engrossing spectacle as the Heat rolled into the NBA Finals. You had big seasons in fat markets like Chicago, Los Angeles and Boston, and stirring improvement in self-obsessed New York. The year rounded out with rollicking six-game final and a poetic upset of the attention-seeking Heat by the low-key Mavericks.

If you weren't entertained, you weren't watching.

But the lockout is foiling the chance to build upon last season's drama. Despite the high drama in the conference rooms, urgency isn't simmering on the outside—lockout news right now feels like an afterthought behind the Penn State crisis and about 15 NFL sagas (the Packers, the Patriots, Tebow, Philly's implosion, etc.).

There's still optimism that the league has wiggle room to get a deal done that would provide for at least a 50-game season. Fifty games doesn't sound like the worst thing in the world.

It's not over, but there's a frosty feeling. On ESPN, NBA Commissioner David Stern warned of a "nuclear winter." Players association executive director Billy Hunter said the players viewed the ownership ultimatums as "extremely unfair." Ready to dissolve, the union moved to file a "disclaimer of interest" alerting the league of its plan to dissolve.

A disclaimer of interest? Outside the NBA, that's already happening."

To the sport's casual fan, the standoff between the owners and players is absolutely unimportant. It's simply not our problem. We have other things we can and will do with our time and money.

That's also the case for advertisers and TV networks. The market works. Choices abound, alternatives exist and life goes on.

Are you listening, players and owners? You're just one among many possibilities for viewers and TV advertisers.

With respect to televised sports viewing, here are just a few of the choices available to the casual fan and advertiser.

Heavily watched televised college football and NFL games will last until early February. Exciting season ending college basketball conference tournaments and the "March Madness" NCAA playoffs will commence in February and last until early April. Then Major League Baseball will take over and last through October, at which time college football and the NFL will again will be in full swing. The circle is complete.

That pretty much covers all twelve months for TV viewing. There's no compelling need for any televised NBA games, let alone a full season of them beginning in November and lasting until June.

And lest we forget, the Olympics will air in 2012, too. Lots and lots of available 2012 TV sports viewing for the casual fan.

The NBA players and owners should make no mistake about who's really in charge. It's the TV fan and the casual one at that.

Without a strong TV audience, the NBA owners wouldn't be able to pay anywhere close to the current average salary of $5.5 million for players. As for the owners, the value of an NBA franchise would deteriorate quite rapidly.

Without TV in the forefront, the end game for the players and owners may be near.The all important casual fan may already be out the door. And if and when the casual fan loses interest, the available TV ad dollar won't amount to much.

If that happens, the level of player salaries and value of owner franchises will reflect that customers have become dissatisfied, and the financial values attached to entertaining professional basketball fans on TV will decline very quickly. In turn advertising funds will evaporate and reappear at more popular venues. That's the free market at work.

In sum, it's a dangerous "rookie" game now being played by NBA players and owners alike. By thumbing their noses at the casual fan base, they may be negotiating themselves out of good jobs and valuable NBA franchises.

But it's their money and their livelihoods, so who cares? Certainly not the taxpayer nor the casual fan.

My guess? Unless absolute idiocy prevails, which it all too often does in emotional labor disputes, look for the NBA season to begin prior to year end or very shortly thereafter. If not by then, the NBA's future looks bleak indeed.

In any case, pro basketball isn't likely to resemble its current self a few short years from now. With respect to players and owners alike, it's pretty much game over for getting lots of money while living on easy street. That will be the simple result of innovation, creative destruction and the free market at work in the private sector.

We're all free to choose in the private sector. Players, owners, unions, advertisers, networks and casual fans, too.

And that's the way taxpayers like it. It's not our dime.

Thanks. Bob.