Before Pam Syfert prostrates herself before the NBA with more than $200 million for a new arena clenched in her quivering fist, there are a couple of things she ought to know. All the signs are there that Syfert and the city’s posse of big-league booty kissers plan to give the NBA the farm in upcoming closed-door arena negotiations. What these dunderheads don’t seem to understand is that all the leverage Charlotte needs to eke out a killer arena deal with the league has already been printed in national newspapers across the country.City leaders, who apparently don’t read these newspapers, or broadcast ratings sheets for that matter, seem to be under the impression that we still need the NBA. They’re wrong. There’s a long and growing list of people who don’t need, want or have any interest in the NBA, financial or otherwise. At the top of that list is NBC, millions of fans, 57 percent of the voters in Charlotte and broadcast executives across the country.
It’s a well-known fact that he who is willing to walk away from a risky deal — and that’s exactly what this is — has the upper hand in negotiations. It’s critical that Syfert is armed with the ugly facts that would level the playing field for Charlotte.
Fact 1: Syfert should start by asking NBA Commissioner David Stern why NBC ditched the NBA after a decade-long broadcast partnership. The answer? Because the network was losing $150 million per year televising NBA games, a combined result of a weak ad market and playoff ratings that have fallen 31 percent since 1998.
Fact 2: Since no other broadcast network was willing to touch the NBA on a full-time basis, it cut a deal with AOL Time Warner and Walt Disney Co. to air its games. Fully one-third of American households — those that don’t receive cable — will now be shut out from most NBA telecasts.
Fact 3: The sticky situation described above has far less to do with current economic conditions than with growing fan disinterest. Even viewership of NBA All-Star games has declined 43 percent since 1993.
Fact 4: Council members continue to cling to their oft-repeated and completely unsubstantiated belief that Hornets fans stopped coming to games because they didn’t like the team’s former owners. But the decline in fan participation is not just an NBA thing, and it has little to do with who owns what team. It’s part of a larger, well-documented fallout among fans, big television and big-league sports that doesn’t show any signs of reversing itself anytime soon. TV ratings for college football’s title game in January were the worst since the creation of the Bowl Championship Series. NFL Pro Bowl ratings have fallen 65 percent since 1995. And a recent report by Morgan Stanley Dean Witter predicted that ABC, CBS and Fox networks will lose a combined $4 billion on sports rights contracts between now and 2006.
But the fans aren’t the main ones to blame for that. Even when they do tune in, television networks struggle to make a profit. According to a report in the Washington Times, Fox Sports aired the most watched baseball game in 10 years last year, posted the best national ratings of any network that televised NFL games, and boasted the largest TV audience for the Daytona 500. But by the end of the year, it was writing off $900 million in losses. The culprit? Fox Sports President Ed Goren attributed the mess to record-breaking broadcast-rights fees and an increasingly anemic pro-sports ad market.
The trend is clear. Unless the NBA plans to somehow remake itself, the fans that once flocked to Hornets games won’t come back over the long term to our new arena or, for that matter, to the majority of other arenas around the country.
Neither will the networks that once broadcast NBA basketball from them or the advertisers who paid for it. But despite all this, the NBA shows no signs of doing anything about its problems except extracting more and more money from local taxpayers to keep itself afloat.
Aside from pushing Michael Jordan’s wheelchair up and down the court, the city’s negotiating team ought to ask Stern what he plans to do to keep his league on its feet and profitable. Given the risk involved in building an arena for such a shaky enterprise, the city’s negotiating team ought to ask the NBA to contribute at least something to the cost of its construction. And they ought to make sure that someone besides the lowly taxpayer is on the hook for the bills if, and I’m inclined to say when, the costs of paying off and running the arena surpass the revenue it brings in.
The bottom line is simple. Though it may not have seemed like it over the last year, the league needs Charlotte a lot more than we need it. This time, the question to ask the NBA is what it’s willing to do for us.
This article appears in Aug 7-13, 2002.
