You’re an NBA fan. Or you’re a media professional who knows the name Mark Lazarus. Maybe you’re both. Recently, you’ve found yourself humming “Roundball Rock.” You’ve pictured Michael Jordan switching hands in midair in the Finals. You’ve devoted a stray thought to Ahmad Rashad. This is normal. Well, pretty normal. It means you’re thinking about the NBA on NBC.
NBC and Turner are fighting for the final piece of the NBA’s media rights package. According to my boss, commissioner Adam Silver may have already decided to declare NBC a winner alongside ESPN and Amazon. There’s a footrace to write the best and meanest thing about David Zaslav, the CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery, Turner’s parent company. Zaslav will either overpay to continue Turner’s 35-year NBA run or hand the rights back to NBC.
I say this as someone who feels NBA on NBC nostalgia: it’s a funny thing to be nostalgic about. NBC’s NBA run lasted 12 years—half the time Charles Barkley has been on Inside the NBA. The network’s franchise players during that period—Marv Albert, Bob Costas, even Jordan himself—have retired or moved on. The fact that we still remember the NBA on NBC, still pine for it in some way, says something about what happened during those 12 years and something about the streaming world we live in today.
It’s worth remembering that the NBA wasn’t always a beloved TV property. The go-to anecdote is that CBS, which held the NBA’s rights before NBC, showed conference finals games—that featured Magic Johnson!—on tape delay as late as 1986. Here’s another one: The year before, ABC declined to give the NBA higher rights fees because, Sports Illustrated quoted an executive saying, “higher salaries will contribute to the drug problem in athletics today.”
In 1989, Dick Ebersol arrived as the NBA’s network savior. Ebersol was named president of NBC Sports after a career in television that stretched from Saturday Night Live to Saturday Night’s Main Event to music shows. (Once, when I interviewed Ebersol over breakfast, he tried to grab the check by arguing, “Bryan, you don’t have rock residuals.”) The day after Ebersol’s first meeting with his NBC troops, he went to see commissioner David Stern.
Ebersol showered Stern with love—the go-to move when an executive is trying to pry rights away from a competitor. Ebersol promised Stern that NBC would show more games than CBS, and more games later on weekend days, when audiences got bigger. Ebersol pitched Stern a Saturday morning NBA kids’ show. As Ebersol wrote in his memoir, federal regulators said a show in that time slot had to have educational value, which meant Inside Stuff would require Rashad and Willow Bay to indoctrinate a new generation of fans.
In 1989, when CBS decided not to renew its NBA deal, Ebersol paid $161 million per year for the rights. When adjusted for inflation, that’s still about $2 billion less per year than NBC’s current $2.5 billion bid. “Guess what?” Ebersol said when he called Albert. “We got the NBA.”
The biggest reason we remember the NBA on NBC is Michael Jordan. In 1991, the first postseason NBC had under the new deal, Jordan had the courtesy to finally beat the “Bad Boy” Pistons in the Eastern Conference finals. Magic Johnson and the Lakers, the gods of the ’80s NBA, were kind enough to pass the torch to Jordan in the Finals, giving him his first title. In that series, Jordan switched hands in midair, inspiring an Albert call that still runs on highlight reels: “Oh! A spec-tac-ular move by Mich-ael Jordan.”
In the 12 years NBC showed NBA games, Jordan won six titles. In 1995, when Jordan unretired after playing one season of minor league baseball, he called up Ebersol, whom he had nicknamed “Dickie Boy,” and asked if NBC would pay him to come back. Jordan understood his value to NBC was like his value to Nike and Gatorade.
NBC got lucky in its non-Jordan years, too. The network had Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant’s first three titles. Tim Duncan’s first title. Hakeem Olajuwon’s two titles. NBC had two Knicks Finals, which is like living in the zone of totality when two different eclipses come around.
Ebersol picked some great announcers. Before he took command, NBC had styled itself as the thinking man’s sports division, an alternative to the corn syrup flowing from CBS.
Albert called the games. Costas hosted the studio show, called NBA Showtime, initially with Pat Riley. Some of Costas’s best work was done with the old network “tease.” He could take a game that was about to start and distill its essence into two heavily-produced minutes, as he did with Game 6 of the ’93 Finals. Today, a podcaster would take 15 minutes to make the same points.
In the ’90s, the NBA on NBC was sports television’s version of a Nike ad or Tina Brown’s Vanity Fair. Which is to say, NBC could promote basketball in the kind of glossy, literate way that made you forget the network was promoting anything. This is sports TV’s sweet spot, that intoxicating mixture of (some) journalism and (a lot of) capitalism, all tied together with a great theme song.
Speaking of which: I bet John Tesh’s “Roundball Rock” has increased nostalgia for the NBA on NBC by 900 percent. Tesh recorded the theme song for Entertainment Tonight, another cornerstone of ’90s advertorial. “Roundball Rock” has been praised and parodied so much that it found the cozy afterlife of a radio hit. It just rocks. Today, ESPN’s Finals coverage uses bumper music like “Mr. Big Stuff” and photos of old players to push you into basketball’s past. NBC lived in the ’90s.
Two years ago, Zaslav pissed off Adam Silver by declaring his Turner networks “don’t have to have the NBA.” As Puck’s Dylan Byers noted, many of the executives who might have patched things up are now gone, including former Turner Sports president Mark Lazarus, who’s wooing the NBA back to NBC.
At NBC in the ’90s, Ebersol was a relationship guy—the anti-Zaz. He and Stern were phone buddies who spent weekend afternoons chatting about bad calls, from the referees (Ebersol’s gripe) or the announcers (Stern’s). Their closeness paid off during the ’91 Finals. With a hot series between the Bulls and Lakers, Ebersol asked if Stern could reschedule Game 4 so it could move from the afternoon to prime time. Stern agreed, Ebersol wrote, provided that NBC moved every future Finals game to prime time.
In 1991, Game 1 of the Finals started at 3:30 p.m. ET on a Sunday. By the next year, no Finals game started before 7 p.m. ET. Ebersol would call his bromance with Stern “the greatest partnership between a league and a network in television history.”
The partnership ran out of gas in 2001. NBA viewership tanked after the 1998-99 lockout. After showering the league with love, Ebersol switched to a second executive gesture: complaining the league was bankrupting the network. He claimed NBC lost $300 million in the last two seasons of its NBA deal.
In 2001, when the NBA was fielding bids for its new media rights packages, NBC found itself competing with ESPN. ESPN won, in part, by promising to put more games on cable. Stern said: “We wanted to reduce the number of games on broadcast.” Ebersol said: “In the future, it will become almost impossible for broadcast television sports to match the power of those subscriber fees.” This year, the wooing of the NBA has played out in reverse. Putting the NBA on NBC is enticing to the league because it could take a lot of games off cable.
Why do people pine for the NBA on NBC? Part of it is longing for a bygone era of basketball. In 2002, when NBC said goodbye to the league, its video montage included not just Jordan’s highlights but Johnson’s return to the All-Star Game after he was diagnosed with HIV, Reggie Miller in the Garden, Dikembe Mutombo finishing off the Sonics, Rudy Tomjanovich’s “heart of a champion” speech, Shaq’s mouth-open run after an alley-oop from Kobe, and the Robert Horry 3-pointer that beat the Kings. If stuff that happened when you were in high school seems 50 percent cooler, by rule, these are still great, canonical highlights.
I think part of pining for the NBA on NBC is also a longing for a different moment in media time. At the dawn of the ’90s, the heart of TV was still on the networks. As Costas noted in a recent interview, the mass audiences of Cheers and Seinfeld and Friends saw ads for the NBA.
In the streaming age, the old network days don’t just seem simpler. They feel unified. A Sunday tripleheader lured viewers to watch a bunch of stars who had, not unimportantly, been built up by network TV’s monoculture since college. The content in front of us was so alluring, so singular in a Game of the Week kind of way, that we didn’t know what we were missing. Bringing back the NBA on NBC won’t bring back the network days. But it does remind us of how we once watched basketball. Da-da-da-da-da-DA-da-da…
