Geez there were a lot of posts in the last 8 hours to catch up on (number of pages doubled since this afternoon):
Just to add to the advertising point: last year's NBA finals (went 6 games, televised on ABC) generated $266 million in ad revenue.
This actually gave me a light bulb moment I hadn't thought about with following all of this and have not heard mentioned by any of the NBA coverage I've heard:
Adam Silver (NBA Commissioner) has been pushing the idea of trying to create some type of in-season tournament. If this goes well enough for the league and for Disney, perhaps it becomes a neutral site tournament held at Disney each year. If that could be the case, this could be big for both the NBA and Disney.
Well, not just speculation, this had been reported as a possibility this week. It appears from today's announcements that they're looking at just Orlando now. As far as the straight to playoffs, I saw a report that the league was polling the owners today to get an idea of their preferences as to whether to play some regular season games, all of them, none of them, play-in tournament, etc.
Well that was a terrible headline, especially considering it's on NBA.com. It was just about the same statement that was reported everywhere earlier today - that they're "engaged in exploratory conversations." There was nothing "official" about them restarting the season in July at WDW.
Just heard this discussed a few days ago on a podcast. I think it would be really cool, and it was their suggestion to just have a few minute delay on the broadcasts in order to censor any language (they also pointed out there'd have to be no live betting that is usually available on games).
Bill Simmons has been pounding the drum on this since at least early this year, if not a lot longer (can't remember when he started pushing it) and just having the league go from December through August. I think it's the Christmas games that typically start bringing audiences anyway.
