national TV exposure

[Kestutis.Kveraga@dartmouth.edu (Kestutis Kveraga)]

Given the snubbing of the Celtics by Turner and LBC (the Lakers Broadcasting Corporation, formerly known as the BBC - Bulls Broadcasting Corporation), I was curious to see what determines how many games a team gets on national TV. Thus, I decided to look 
at the entire national TV schedule (defined as all NBA regular-season games on TBS, TNT, and NBC for the upcoming season) to see if I can make any sense out of it. I took the liberty of including a graph showing how many games each team got on TBS, TNT, N
BC, and the total combined games. (I apologize if some of our international members have to pay for bandwidth - I hope it's worthwhile. )

The solid line in each subplot is the number of games the team received, and the dotted line is each team's regular-season record for the '00-'01 season (adjusted for the total # of games that network is showing), so you can see the effect of a team's rec
ord on the number of games it received. Two basic predictions would be that a) each team gets approximately the same number of games ("equal exposure"); and b) the number of games a team gets is predicted by its record during the regular season ("merit ex
posure"). Of course, we can dismiss the "equal exposure" hypothesis right off the bat, with one team receiving 26 games (Lakers), and five others, zero. The "merit exposure" hypothesis may have some merit, but the sharp peaks (and valleys) in the solid li
ne ought to alert people to the fact that regular season record is not a great predictor of national TV exposure. 

I won't bore you with the statistical details, but just say that national TV exposure is not a linear function of regular season record, explaining barely half of the variance in the  data (higher-order models do somewhat better but that's another story).
 Then I checked to see whether playoff perfomance is a better predictor (assigning 1 point for each series won plus a point for making the playoffs). That turned out better, predicting about 72% of the variance, and up to 75% when both predictors are incl
uded. That's hardly surprising - when you look at the NBC schedule (subplot 3), you can see that they're showing ONLY playoff teams from last season (albeit in highly irregular proportions). In addition, I'm sure factors such as the number of "stars" (All
-Stars, 1st-, 2nd-, 3rd-team All-NBA members etc.*), and TV ratings from the previous season play a major role in national TV exposure.  Things like how many times your team plays the Lakers (undisputed network darlings) may also play a role. But I''ve ru
n out of steam and have wasted a lot of time already, so I don't feel like finding and plugging in this information.  So there you have it. 

Given all this, I can see some rationale in the networks' decision to make the schedule the way they did, but I still feel it's deeply wrong to shut some teams out completely. But of course, we all know that the sole role of TV programming (excluding stat
ions like PBS) is to keep the viewer glued to the TV set until commercials come around (as they do so often these days), and apparently they''ve decided that nothing keeps the advertising money flowing in like Kobe vs. Vince or Allen. Now, we just have to
 solve the "mystery" of why the Knicks are getting so much exposure.
Kestas

*although it's obviously confounded with a team's performance and thus the other predictors

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