Projo Sports Blog

BY KEVIN McNAMARA
Journal Sports Writer

BOSTON -- NBA commissioner David Stern held his annual address for the national (and international) media at The Finals and he hit on several interesting topics:

-- The 9 p.m. start times are the bane of the existence for every Rhode Island parent with a basketball-crazed grade-schooler. Here’s the bad news: they probably aren’t going away because the national audience is greatest at that time.

"Nothing is set in stone," Stern said. "We wrestle with it because if the idea is to let the largest audience see the game, including youngsters, there's no doubt that at 11:30 Eastern, that's when the largest audience is gathered in. We get the quarter hours, you wouldn't think that.

"Second of all, we're wrestling with a time where if you take ESPN.com, Yahoo, NBA.com, FoxSports.com, CBSsportsline.com, we're literally having billions of visits a year to those sites and hundreds of millions of downloads of video streaming and we're spending a lot of time focusing on the kids that are very much involved in that.”

"I was excoriated on Boston radio for this issue, and having thought about it, it wouldn't be a terrible thing to have a Sunday night game at 7:00 o'clock," Stern said. "But our network partners tell us that our ratings will be lower, and to me that isn't just about selling air time, that means that you'll have a lower audience count, and why would you want to have a lower audience count? So that's the dilemma that we face. But it's not set in stone. It's something that we're prepared to look at on a continuing basis."

-- One of the historic plays of the 1984 Boston-Los Angeles Finals came when Kevin McHale clotheslined Kurt Rambis as the Laker forward was cruising in for a layup. The foul typified the Celtics’ physical play and clearly shook the Lakers. Boston went on to win the series in seven games.

Today, McHale’s foul would’ve warranted a suspension due to a league emphasis to cut down on hard fouls.

"I think there might have been some games lost by the player involved," said Stern. "We have, over the years, made a determination that the sport is really quite beautiful and quite graceful and quite extraordinary, and that our players are capable of inflicting great harm on each other if we don't regulate it. If you throw a punch, whether you connect or not, through the rules that suspend players for coming off the bench, for the rules that have Flagrant Fouls 1 and 2, those represent our determination that we would not be responsible for either allowing or condoning or generally sort of turning a blind eye to an increase in violence in our game."

-- Stern is not a fan of the loud, blaring music and the pre-game fireworks that have become a staple in most NBA arenas. But he’s only the commissioner and won’t issue any wide-ranging edicts of change.

"You know, as this is my 25th Finals, I'm allowed to say that we've got to do something about flopping and we have to do something about fireworks at games," he said. "The fireworks have been much more popular with the media than the flopping, but you have to say something at press conferences as you go around, and so those are my two topics for the playoff season.

"We did make one rule. No matter what you do pregame, it is very important that the fans, the players and the television audience be able to see the court when the game starts. That's my line in the sand, okay? And we're going to enforce that very strictly. And it hasn't always been enforced. But beyond that, we're trying to find something that does not change the essential exciting nature, et cetera, but maybe there's something to do with noise versus fire. We want to be as welcoming as we can to the broad array of ways that our teams like to entertain their fans. And indeed, really the question is how the fans like to be entertained, and that's what we're trying to find out."

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