Wednesday, April 09, 2003

LEAGUE PASS HATE POST: Lang Whitaker explains why Mavs/Lakers was not on my teevee last night:

On Time Warner's digital cable, the League Pass is on channels 400 through 412. It used to be that channel 400 was what they called NBA.com TV. During the day they replayed all the old NBA Entertainment specials, which was always cool to park on for a minute and check out. At night, while games were going on, half of the screen was a scoreboard with live scores of every NBA game on the screen. The other half of the screen was highlights from the games, along with occasional "expert" analysis from media people I'd never heard of.

But at some point this season, the NBA decided that we were getting too much for our money, and they yanked the channel and renamed it NBA TV, then made it available only through a separate subscription service. Problem is that right now, Time Warner cable doesn't offer the channel.

All that to say that even though I paid to get all the NBA games on the League Pass, the NBA decided that it was more important to make a buck than show the most important game of the week to the customers that had already bought their product. And you wonder why there are empty arenas around the League...

The same is apparently true for Comcast cable, because that game was nowhere on my digital cable last night either. Thank you, David Stern. And how does Stern continue to allow Sterling to own the Clippers? Does Jerry Buss need a foil that badly? I don't get it.

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