Did the NBA product suddenly suck when viewership dropped by 50% when MJ 1st retired?

[Art Barr]

NBC put NBA players in the position of a musical act having to follow up after a James Brown performance.

You cant follow MJ. He was a once in a lifetime act.

It was like when James brown made living in America, with qu8ncy Jones back on the block meets the failed commercual rao group the famlee level of urban marketing.

That is as pretentious.
as barney rubble raps on cereal commercials.


What is crazy tho.

How the hell was alf rapunzel actually good.




While somehow not being pretentious like that.
While airing on a children's network.
i believe before NBA on NBC too. Sohh NBC did have someone there. that was a taste maker.
for that sellout urban marketing shyt somewhere. Yet when it came to scaling it back.
or using that same guy. To recognize when to dial it back. That person was not present at NBC. It is wild because NBC used to be able to do.
urban gritty progressive shyt marketed to kids. As rhe good episode of different strokes aired
on nbc.




While alternatively the wack different strokes episode in the wack modern set. Was on disney.



[The abc theme rendition immediately signaled. han solo i got a bad feeling about this. To this day. I doubt i could st9mach a few minutes of arnold or sam on abc. ]
Disney, whom never really learned.
to make.
or in house create.
that type of urban loud nickolodean commercial sanitized you can't do that on canadian televisoon style programming. Yet when it came time to apply it. Or tone it down. Whomever used to know how to do that.
on nbc programming was not there for nba on nbc.

Nbc kept up their white James brown from the blues brothers meets sanitized urban marketing thing to loud. To their detriment and also making and sinking the nba.
Further into the stigma.
of being this urban only construct. Wink wink quotes on urban.



Art Barr



What is crazy is.
NBC always never knew when to stop.
Or have quality when needed. So they have always dropped the ball. When it comes time to make shows that entail showcasing soul. Or when trying to blow up a commodity they have in an urban ideal. They seem to lose all semblance. Of what to do. Hence.

the Gary Coleman cartoon.



That they botched.

Either.
Before or after.



They botched casting Gary Coleman in other projects. Like TV movies that ruined coleman's draw.
That coleman never recovered from. As the standards and practices of their network. Really dripped the ball.

Case in point this.

Making Coleman a firebug.
Not realizing this is Gary Coleman. Not the child actor you want to be the face of being a fire bug. Coleman is bigger than that.
Better than that.



So nbc has always fukked it up. When it came to anything involving showcasing soul for a long period of time. Plus have shown to be inept. When sustaining that draw.
in their own ambitions as well.

Art Barr

 

[Fresh]

no

 

[Illuminatos]

It was garbage

Boy this shyt looks primitive as fukk.
Slowly walk the ball up the court, pass to the post and watch a big man miss a contested mid range. No ball movement, barely any motion off the ball.

No wonder they think 90s defense was good. No one is moving off the ball or is a threat outside so you have 3-4 defenders ignoring their man and clogging the lane.

 

[Joe Sixpack]

Boy this shyt looks primitive as fukk.
Slowly walk the ball up the court, pass to the post and watch a big man miss a contested mid range. No ball movement, barely any motion off the ball.

No wonder they think 90s defense was good. No one is moving off the ball or is a threat outside so you have 3-4 defenders ignoring their man and clogging the lane.

Dikembe wasn't a scorer so this is not a good example

I agree overall some of the 90s shyt was bad and it was mainly the Pat Riley Knicks that messed up all the games

 

[DaMos Supreme]

He got a 45 on this dunk. I remember being PISSED!

It’s one of my favorite dunks ever (in-game or contest). Kemp was robbed!!!! Kemp made it look so effortless in real time that I believe the judges didn’t comprehend what they saw. The slow motion replay of that dunk from 6’10 PF is still ridiculous to me!

 

[G-Zeus]

I think you’re forgetting that nostalgia happened because people loved the game at that point. Michigan was playing struggle football all year and I tuned in because I feel connected to it. The NBA doesn’t have that. Fans even bond over a shyt product in soccer and football.

It's because the NBA fan is attached mostly to the players...not the team.

It is even more player based than soccer and soccer has the most fans. But soccer teams are a thing worth dying for for some fans.


It's why the debate is MJ vs LBJ.

It take away from the reality of the period.

That 80's 90's defense would get neutered

Not saying these players wouldn't if you switch them eras adapt.. but they had it easier. Fouls doesn't not mean better defense

 

[DaMos Supreme]

Those Lenny Wilkens Hawks and Cavaliers coached teams and Mike Fratello Hawks and Cavs coached teams were mid af.....despite consistently winning 50 games per season.

This is another one of those nostalgic trips for me catching those Hawks games on TBS back in the day,and looking back fondly on those Lenny, Nique, Stacy Augmon, and Mookie Blaylock teams.

 

[threattonature]

Baseball and Football have generational fans. I lived in a time where the Celtic Lakers rivalry history was just as loud and Magic & Bird. Same when it was Pistons vs Celtics and Sixers vs Celtics. The NBA used to build fans along team lines.

This is all revisionist history looking at the old era with rose colored lenses. I bought this BS line of thinking for a long time until actually reading some books from that era. Breaks of the Game and another I'm forgetting the name of. Even then there were complaints about marketing the game too heavily around stars but the plan worked.. The NBA reached its highest level of popularity by marketing Bird and Magic and continued by marketing Jordan. Yes it has the downside of risking popularity when those stars retire but it has the upside of taking the game to heights it never would have reached without marketing stars. In the end it's worth it as stars draw.

You stay painting it like football has a bunch of hardcore fans as if it's due to marketing and not the beneficial nature of the NFL schedule. Football is a communal event at this point. A lot of football fans are as casual as can be but will rock the gear as watching the games can be an event. Only one game a week. Much easier to follow compared to other sports night to night. Baseball and football have fans that only watch their own team's games while basketball fans are more likely to watch many more teams outside of their own. All the NBA teams with "diehards" are usually because those teams experienced long periods of success.

nikkas stay with the dishonest dikk sucking of the NFL. The NFL gets ratings despite itself.

 

[Mantis Toboggan M.D.]

Dikembe wasn't a scorer so this is not a good example

I agree overall some of the 90s shyt was bad and it was mainly the Pat Riley Knicks that messed up all the games

Everyone played slow as fukk. By 1997-98 the fastest team in the league was the lakers at 93 possessions per game (a team built around Shaq was the fastest team in the league ) and by the mid to late 90’s we had multiple teams playing around 85 per game with Cleveland at the bottom just under 83 possessions per game

 

[Trojan 24]

MJ really did ruin the game, he took it to place where individually no one thought possible. And no it wasn't a media creation, we can pull up video's on YouTube and see it was all real. And for 30 years the league and the media has been chasing that lightening in a bottle and no one has even gotten close no matter what reddit cacs try to tell you

 

[Field Marshall Bradley]

Ffwd that same mentality has led to: your regular season don’t matter, your playoffs don’t matter, your all star game don’t matter, nothing matters at all except the chip. And guess what we gon dismiss that too if we don’t like you. Bron got a ‘bubble ring’. Tatum wins a ring it’s ‘but you didn’t do it with aura’, and ‘JB is better’. League is cooked bc the fanbase is cooked and that’s the genesis

There’s something to this.

 

[NYC Rebel]

This is all revisionist history looking at the old era with rose colored lenses. I bought this BS line of thinking for a long time until actually reading some books from that era. Breaks of the Game and another I'm forgetting the name of. Even then there were complaints about marketing the game too heavily around stars but the plan worked.. The NBA reached its highest level of popularity by marketing Bird and Magic and continued by marketing Jordan. Yes it has the downside of risking popularity when those stars retire but it has the upside of taking the game to heights it never would have reached without marketing stars. In the end it's worth it as stars draw.

Are you really going to sit there and can't tell the difference between the first 30 seconds of this intro being all MJ


compared to this which talks about the ebb and flow of the series?



Even on the cusp of Dr. J finally a game away from winning his first NBA ship, he was barely mentioned and the focus was around the Sixers and Lakers.



Even when Musberger speaks, he doesn't even speak on Dr. J, the most loved player in the league that time.
I can post numerous opening credits from back then.

Bird and Magic in game one of the NBA finals....where is THEIR rivarly even mentioned?



"tonight a new chapter unfolds in one of sports classic rivalries." Not even a mention of Bird or Magic. They played second fiddle TO the rivalry.

Game two in the 87' finals....not a mention of either Bird or Magic


Even Game 1 of the 84 finals where Bird and Magic met for the first time, they were mentioned but through history of the Lakers Celtics old rivalry.




Where is the evidence you speak on? can you imagine a Timberwolves game without Anthony Edwards being mentioned to open the game?

You stay painting it like football has a bunch of hardcore fans as if it's due to marketing and not the beneficial nature of the NFL schedule. Football is a communal event at this point. A lot of football fans are as casual as can be but will rock the gear as watching the games can be an event. Only one game a week. Much easier to follow compared to other sports night to night. Baseball and football have fans that only watch their own team's games while basketball fans are more likely to watch many more teams outside of their own. All the NBA teams with "diehards" are usually because those teams experienced long periods of success.

Baseball has tons of game yet their fans are team first.

nikkas stay with the dishonest dikk sucking of the NFL. The NFL gets ratings despite itself.

and what does that have to do with the NFL building interest around team interest more than star power?

 

[Field Marshall Bradley]

 

[Osmosis]

MJ really did ruin the game, he took it to place where individually no one thought possible. And no it wasn't a media creation, we can pull up video's on YouTube and see it was all real. And for 30 years the league and the media has been chasing that lightening in a bottle and no one has even gotten close no matter what reddit cacs try to tell you

We've seen the footage





Jordan stood out because he played in an unskilled era

 

[Trojan 24]

We've seen the footage





Jordan stood out because he played in an unskilled era

Oh no a bad play, like I said no one has come close no matter what Reddit Cacs tell you