Re: [Celtic_Pride] national TV exposure

["Simon Kean" <simon@jkean.freeserve.co.uk>]

Some people need to get out more :)

Simon

----- Original Message -----
From: <Kestutis.Kveraga@dartmouth.edu>
To: <celtics@igtc.com>; <Celtic_Pride@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Monday, July 30, 2001 8:40 PM
Subject: [Celtic_Pride] national TV exposure


> 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
>
>
> [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
>
>
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