More mysterious than “Unsolved Mysteries” and with enough bad guys for a whole season of “Law & Order,” the Bulls and New York Knicks bring their act to prime time Wednesday night.
And if the overnight ratings from Monday afternoon’s telecast are any indication, Game 5 of this NBA Eastern Conference final could leave lots of smiles around NBC’s Rockefeller Center headquarters come Thursday morning.
According to the Nielsen overnights, Game 4 at the Stadium had a 13.4 rating, up 46 percent over last year’s Memorial Day NBA telecast, which also featured the Bulls. Monday’s game was the highest rating for a conference final game, topping the 12.6 from last year’s final between the Bulls and Cleveland. (A rating point equals 930,000 households.)
“Seemingly, every game in this series has set some kind of record,” said NBC Sports President Dick Ebersol on Tuesday. “Game 1 was the highest-rated Game 1 of a conference final ever. And Game 2 is the highest-rated sports show Turner Broadcasting has ever had. We don’t have the nationals for Game 3 yet, but the overnights for Monday show it probably will be the highest-rated Memorial Day (NBA) telecast in history.”
The highest rating for an NBA game was 21.2, for Game 7 of the 1988 finals between Detroit and Los Angeles, and the second highest was 19.7, for Game 5 of the 1991 finals between the Bulls and Lakers.
With both Chicago and New York represented in what now has become a best-of-three showdown, network officials believe the broadcasts planned for Wednesday and Friday nights will surpass last year’s Eastern Conference Games 5 and 6 (again the Bulls and Cavaliers), which posted the second- and third-highest ratings (12.2 and 11.4, respectively) for a non-finals game.
“It’s very rare in any sport that you get a conference final that has this level of interest,” Ebersol said. “But it has been building now for more than a year.”
Ah, yes, that buildup. What also has helped build up that audience, as Ebersol quickly pointed out, was a Western Conference first-round series between the Los Angeles Lakers and Phoenix Suns. With those two teams battling into overtime of a fifth and deciding contest, NBC’s ratings average for the playoffs already is 2 percent above last year. And it’s just getting into prime time.
“You might say we’re playing with the house’s money now,” said an NBC spokesman.
“It’s a magnificent layout,” said Ebersol, previewing Wednesday night’s game. “Plus, you’ve got this subtext with the New York papers writing this ridiculous story about Michael (Jordan’s) night in New Jersey. It’s absurd. You’re talking about a man going with his father to a city that has legalized gambling.”
As if any Bulls network appearance needs hype.
“The Bulls are clearly the biggest draw in the league,” Ebersol added. “And they have been since (NBC) first became involved (in 1990-91). From the midseason of that first year until now, they’ve clearly surpassed all comers in being an audience draw.
“And the Chicago market is phenomenal. The kind of ratings the Bulls draw in Chicago are unprecedented in sports, with the exception of Denver with the Broncos and Chicago with the Bears. But for basketball, this has been an extraordinary run. It’s not something that just happens at this stage of the playoffs. Chicago supports the Bulls in an almost unprecedented manner all year round.”
And that kind of support translates into advertising dollars for the network when next year’s contracts are signed. Advertisers, such as Coca-Cola and Miller Brewing, bought NBA inventory at the beginning of the season based on last year’s ratings. They get a bargain for this year based on those advertising rates, but next year the networks raise their charges because of the higher ratings being set up by the additional prime-time exposure this week as both conference finals go to at least six games.
And “what the advertisers are going to be excited about is that the (ratings) numbers this week will be comparable to finals-like numbers,” said Ebersol, “only 10 days earlier.”
Ebersol isn’t making any predictions, but probably is looking at a rating of at least 13.4, which was the lowest of the six Bulls-Portland Trail Blazers contests in the ’92 Finals. Even though it’s prime time, Ebersol said, the lengths of the commercial breaks would be the same as they have been all season.
Even though the length of the breaks do not increase, they sometimes include fewer commercials, Ebersol said, because “at this level of competition, we feel the average fan really wants to see the replays, so we don’t go into commercials as quickly as we do earlier in the season. We normally would be in a commercial from five to 10 seconds from the time the ref blew his whistle for a timeout.
“If you’re sitting at a game, you don’t realize that for the first 30 seconds after the stoppage of play we’re showing the home viewer replays, then we’re showing the commercial. But the spots are the same length as they normally are-as long as 2 1/2 minutes.”
The length of the Bulls-Knicks games have been up over many regular-season and playoff games, topped by Monday’s game time of 2 hours 42 minutes. In that contest, 65 free throws were shot, and in Game 3, 74 free throws were attempted. Both are unusually high totals and partially account for the long games. Game 3 lasted 2:32, while Games 1 and 2 were 2:32 and 2:38, respectively.
A 13.4 rating also might give NBC a rare Wednesday night victory over ABC’s prime-time lineup that features hits such as “Home Improvement” and “Coach.” That’s part of the reason NBC dumped its usual Wednesday night lineup that featured made-for-TV movies and “Law & Order”-with its 10s and 11s ratings-for some hoops.
“It’s not only the strength of this attraction,” said Ebersol, “but also because we’re through with the May sweeps and nobody’s programming original material other than these games. Last year, we won both weeks of the NBA Finals. I would assume the same thing will happen this week.”
