My gripe with national TV coverage of the playoffs

Now that the afterglow is waning from the game last night, I can think clearly and put together some thoughts about what I watched.  In short, the Blazers have depth.  They have players that can finish the task at hand.  Whether they continue on this path is yet to be seen.  But it showed Charles Barkley what the rest of us already knew - the Blazers are pretty good when they put it all together.

Now, that being said, the first round of the playoffs is the worst for TV coverage.  There are so many games that games start to overlap each other.  Instead of starting games earlier to allow for more transition time, the networks just seem to think that games will all last exactly two and a half hours.  When I turned on my TV last night to watch the Blazers - I instead had to watch Dallas finish off the Spurs....slowly, with all the fouls and the timeouts.  We all knew that Dallas was going to win that game.  But we had to watch.  And I'm ok with that.  If I were a Dallas fan, I would want to see the game to the very last shot.  That's what fans do.

But with that game taking so long, TNT had to switch over to the Blazers game at the 8 minute mark of the first quarter.  What the hell?  I didn't get any pregame coverage.  I didn't get to see the starting line-ups.  I didn't get to see the tip-off.  And I didn't get to see Nicolas Batum score the first five points for the Blazers.  What a joke.

Really?  Do we have to let each network run a line of games?  Couldn't TNT take an early game and ESPN take a late game?  Don't fans get a choice?  I'm debating on whether or not to boycott every product I saw advertised last night just out of spite.  I'm so sick of corporate America tainting everything they're trying to promote.  In the Portland area, the big controversy is that Comcast Sportsnet has the exclusive rights to the Blazers' games.  And Comcast is cable and they refuse to release the games to satellite providers.  So that means we have legions of fans, with their DirectTV dishes, that can't watch games (this is not a problem for me - I would rather pay for the cable and have the games obviously).

And now, when the games all finally go national, we miss the whole first part of the game.  And there is no second option to view the game.  None.  It's a sham.  And it's only about the networks making as much money as possible with little regard to true fan bases that only want to watch the damn game start to finish.

The above paragraph has been disproved.  Apparantly there was a second local option that I was unaware of because my cable provider listed regular programming instead of the playoffs on a local station.  I'm very glad that I get to watch my local guys for the next games though.  Even so, the national TV broadcast still shafted Blazers and Suns fans not living in local markets. 

Now, if the Blazers had lost that game last night, I'd be a whole new level of pissed.  What if the Blazers couldn't feel me shouting through the TV and had taken a loss.  But we won.  And I got to see the most gut-churning endings I've ever had to endure.  But I still would've been in on the game from the start.