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January 7, 2009
David Lies Some More
The Flying Guillotine
Atlantic Yards Report scores an honorable mention in this blog post, which makes it clear that fudging attendance figures goes well beyond Brett Yormark and the New Jersey Nets — it appears to permeate the entire NBA.
Check out this recent post about the same issue regarding the New Jersey Nets and their attendance lies from Atlantic Yards Report. They claim there that you should subtract 25% of the announced attendance and that is the actual amount of people that are there. Maybe in the past but this year that seems a bit generous.
This type of stuff has been going on with the NBA for years (and other sports leagues, MLS I’m looking at you) and hurts their overall credibility which in turn hurts their ever dwindling fan base. For a league that has decided to live and die on the casual fan this is tantamount to suicide. David Stern should take the brunt of the blame. He has spun and lied about just every critical topic involving the NBA over the last 10 years (where is the transparency about referees?). He has done nothing but bring the leagues visibility down (leaving big markets Vancouver, Seattle for much smaller markets, taking short term money gains to move to cable while reducing overall network TV exposure) while refusing to face the problem that their live event product is substandard to that of other sports on a per $/per ticket basis. He has lost all credibility and when David Stern loses credibility the league loses credibility.
Posted by eric at January 7, 2009 12:51 PM