What If They Scheduled a Game and Nobody Came?

A show of hands, please. How many of you out there are aware that the San Antonio Spurs swept the Cleveland Cavaliers to win the NBA title for the fourth time in a decade?


Gee, what a shock. Not many of you did. The championship series that mercifully concluded on ESPN on ABC played to a record-low TV audience. ABC could not wait to get back to reruns of "Grey's Anatomy" and "Desperate Housewives", which the NBA Finals pre-empted.


Everyone seems to have a theory on why few folks chose to watch roundball on a summer's eve. Here's ours:

1. Three times a year, the networks save their best shows for the period where ratings determine the rates they can charge to advertisers. They're called sweeps months. And since they happen to be in the prime months of November, February and May, the networks don't want sports cluttering up their otherwise crucial schedules, unless it's the Super Bowl or the Olympic Winter Games. But the NBA and the NHL, who should really be determining their champion in April or May, are willing to wait until it's almost the Fourth of July to get a shot at a network TV audience.
2. If you're comparing sports leagues to TV shows, the NFL is "American Idol". Major League Baseball is "Days of Our Lives". The NBA is "Survivor" And the NHL is one of those Sunday morning interview programs.
3. The Spurs, as we mentioned, have won four NBA titles in the past decade. That puts them up there with the New England Patriots (three Super Bowl titles), New York Yankees (three World Series titles, and Detroit Red Wings (three Stanley Cup titles). But to most folks, the Spurs have no personalities and are boring as hell to watch. As for Cleveland, they might have LeBron James and the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame . . . but it's still Cleveland.

This might sound like a radical suggestion, but with the proliferation of games on cable and satellite TV during the season, wouldn't it make more sense to put the NBA and NHL finals there instead of on the networks? Let ESPN and TNT have the NBA finals instead of having ABC use Eva Longoria in the stands as product placement for "Desperate Housewives". And the NHL deserves better than the cloak of invisibility on Versus, and getting bumped for horse racing on NBC.

Then maybe the season can end on time. Or maybe not.