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Barbara Barker: Does it get any better than this? For two months, I’ve been asking myself that question. A few weeks ago, after a replay of OG Anunoby’s putback showed up on my Instagram for the 1,000th time and I felt compelled to watch it yet again, I knew the answer. It’s time to move on. Instead of summoning my inner Riley and faxing in my resignation, I want to take this chance to thank my editors, co-workers and most of all Newsday readers. Even in stressful circumstances — like having 10 minutes to turn a “Knicks blew it” column into a “I don’t believe what I just saw” column after they mounted a historical 29-point comeback in Game 4 of the Finals — I have felt honored to have your trust. Thank you for this incredible ride. Thanks to you, I’ve covered almost every major sporting event, including 13 U.S. Opens (tennis), 11 NBA Finals, four Super Bowls, two WNBA Finals, two Final Fours, one World Series and one Stanley Cup Final.
Golden Knights owner Bill Foley will take time away from his vacation to return to Las Vegas to attend portions of NBA Summer League. Foley, who has been in wine country in Northern California escaping the triple-digit Southern Nevada heat since the Knights were beaten by the Carolina Hurricanes in the Stanley Cup Final, will be in Las Vegas this week as he and his group are in the midst of a bid to land an NBA expansions team. “I’m planning on coming back when they do the summer league and seeing if I can connect with a few people within the NBA,” Foley told the Review-Journal last week. “I was going to run back down to Vegas. I’m out of town right now. I try and get out when the temperature hits 100.”
Golden Knights owner Bill Foley will take time away from his vacation to return to Las Vegas to attend portions of NBA Summer League. Foley, who has been in wine country in Northern California escaping the triple-digit Southern Nevada heat since the Knights were beaten by the Carolina Hurricanes in the Stanley Cup Final, will be in Las Vegas this week as he and his group are in the midst of a bid to land an NBA expansions team.
Golden Knights owner Bill Foley said Las Vegas is ready for an NBA team, and he wants to be part of the ownership group that completes the addition of the final big four major league sport to Southern Nevada. Foley, who has seen the Knights make the Stanley Cup Final three times and win the Cup once in their first nine seasons, said he’s ready to go through the expansion process again.
Two months since Scripps affiliates went dark for Comcast customers, the local station group’s broadcast networks have now gone dark for DirecTV customers across the country. Scripps is among the largest operators of ABC affiliates across the country, meaning impacted customers will be unable to watch the NBA Finals or Stanley Cup Final — both of which start this week — through DirecTV platforms.
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ClutchPoints: Alonzo Mourning is in the house for the Stanley Cup Final 🔥 (via @FlaPanthers) pic.twitter.com/hHi16gHC0w
Alonzo Mourning is in the house for the Stanley Cup Final 🔥
— ClutchPoints (@ClutchPoints) June 11, 2024
(via @FlaPanthers) pic.twitter.com/hHi16gHC0w
Back in the States, where soccer is still not exactly what anyone would call a matter of life and death, the TV audience was anything but insignificant. Not only did the Italy-England match deliver more viewers than each game of NBC Sports’ coverage of the Stanley Cup Final, but it also handily out-delivered nearly every game of the 2020-21 NBA season. Per Nielsen, only the Christmas Day Mavs-Lakers broadcast, two playoff outings and the three NBA Finals games have put up bigger numbers than Sunday’s overseas soccer showdown. For the sake of context, the two conference semifinals telecasts (Bucks-Nets, Hawks-Sixers) were both Game 7s.
Albert also called eight Super Bowls and eight Stanley Cup Finals. "My 55 years of broadcasting the NBA has just flown by and I've been fortunate to work with so many wonderful and talented people," Albert said. "Now, I'll have the opportunity to hone my gardening skills and work on my ballroom dancing."
The first round of the draft averaged 2.65 million — ESPN’s top NBA audience in the month of November since 2018 — and ranked second for the night in adults 18-49 and 18-34 behind “The Masked Singer” on FOX. The steep decline and multi-year low for the NBA Draft is in keeping with the broader trend facing the sports media industry. The NBA Finals, World Series, Stanley Cup Final, final rounds of the Masters and U.S. Open — and more — have hit historic lows since the wave of cancellations and postponements in March.
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Like the playoffs as a whole, the steep drop for the Finals is in line with the industry-wide trend. Even after losing half of its year-ago audience, the Finals held up better than the Stanley Cup Final (-61%) or the final round of golf’s U.S. Open (-56%), which were similarly shifted from June to late summer.
But the MLB playoffs (down 39 percent), the NFL (down 14 percent), the NHL playoffs (down 25 percent) and the Stanley Cup Finals (down 61 percent) are all experiencing ratings drops. These dips are seemingly overlooked because it doesn’t fit the narrative that a league predominantly composed of Black men raising concerns over the justice system and condemning systemic racism is bad for business.
If low by conference final standards, the games held up well by most others. Saturday’s clinching Nuggets-Lakers Game 5 was the weekend’s highest rated and most-watched non-NFL sporting event with a 2.4 and 4.79 million viewers on TNT, easily winning a crowded head-to-head against college football (Florida State-Miami: 1.6, 2.95M; Alabama-Missouri: 1.15, 2.09M) and Game 5 of the Stanley Cup Final (1.5, 2.71M).
Two NBA players specifically pointed to the Knights’ success as an indication that Las Vegas would support a basketball team. The Knights made the Stanley Cup Final in their inaugural season and drew crowds beyond capacity for most games. “Even just from adding an NHL team, they’re doing great things,” reigning NBA MVP James Harden of the Houston Rockets said. “It’s built for it. Obviously, the money is there, but I think the fan support is there as well. We saw that in hockey.”