NBC start times could be bad news for NBA viewership

When games air on NBC or stream on Peacock during their regular Tuesday night time slot, the first game with start at 8 p.m. Eastern time and the second will begin at 8 p.m. Pacific time — 11 p.m. on the East Coast. That's not the case for their Monday night games, where early games will begin at 7 or 7:30 ET, and the late games will begin at 10 ET.

That's a crucial hour when it comes to East Coast viewership. Staying up until 12:30 to catch the end of a West Coast game is difficult, but plausible. Watching a game that won't end until 1:30 is a very different story — especially with the possibility of overtime. It's hard to imagine significant number of East Coast fans committing to 150 minutes of basketball viewing at 11 p.m. on a weeknight.

For NBC, the idea seems to be to present each game in prime time on one coast, without messing with local news telecasts on either side. Perhaps they believe that the streaming nature of the telecasts means fans will watch at any time, though that seems to lose one of the most valuable elements of TV sports rights: live programming where viewers can't skip commercials.

Maybe the whopping financial numbers (NBC paid $2.5B for its piece of the rights package) made it worth it for the NBA to sacrifice viewership numbers. But in terms of growing the game and making the sport available to the most fans, Tuesday's planned schedule is a big step back.