Sports Time Radio

The NBA Finals ended on October 11th when the Los Angeles Lakers beat the Miami Heat 106-93 to win the series four games to two. Now the NBA wants to start the 2020-21 season on Christmas day and apparently “The King” Lebron James might not be too happy about that.

Lakers forward Dany Green was on a podcast and mentioned that if the NBA does start the season on Christmas day he expect James and a few other veteran player to sit out the first month of the season.

Now the NBA has a big, big money television contract that says they have to play at least 72 regular season games; so a Christmas day start date makes sense. If they end up starting later they’d have to squeeze in those 72 games in a much shorter timeframe.

Now what I’m having trouble understanding is why is this an issue? The Lakers and the Heat would’ve been off for two and a half months, but Green made it seem like that wasn’t enough time off. Unfortunately he never really explained why; so we’re left to guess.

My guess is that the players are selfish and they want that big money, but they don’t want to play the actually games to get it. Now this doesn’t go for all the players in the NBA just the ones that would take that first month of the regular season off.

Now don’t forget that James complained about the All-Star break not being long enough; so the NBA gave it to him. Now the All-Star break is a week long. Remember James wanted that extra time to spend with his family, but then that first year the NBA extended the All-Star break James spent time in Miami with his buddies and then went to a Dallas Cowboys game. Sounds like family time to me.

What these players don’t seem to realize is that no one is watching their games anymore. Just take a look at how far down the ratings fell during the NBA Finals and for that matter the ratings fell for all of the games played in the bubble. Now the NBA got that big money television deal based on their ratings doing well for the networks that they’re games are shown on. With the ratings in the tank do they think that the next television contract is going to be for as much money as this last one was. Of course there isn’t a player out their that’s going to take a pay cut when that smaller television money is offered to them.

Now I’ve mentioned many times that I’ve lost all interest in the NBA and judging by the ratings I’m not the only one. Imagine what the ratings would be if players like James sit out the first month of next season. If they couldn’t get fans to tune in to watch James win a championship he was pretty much handed; how are they going to get fans to watch with star players not playing? I’d love to know an answer to that.

I get that the NBA is a players league and they’ve bowed down to James before; so it will be interesting to see if he pushes for a later start date if the NBA gives in again. It’s really not a good look for any league when one player has so much power.

On Sunday NASCAR started the Autotrader EchoPark Automotive 500 at Texas Motor Speedway, but only got 52 laps in before the rain came. Now they tried to wait out the rain on Sunday, but where unable to get the rest of the race in. They had originally planned to finish the race on Monday, but the weather wouldn’t allow that either; so they moved it to Tuesday. Well you guess it the weather still didn’t cooperate and they had to postpone the race again. Now the race is scheduled to finally restart at 2:00 p.m. (CST) today; weather permitting.

In case you don’t remember Clint Bowyer was leading the race when the rains came on Sunday. He’s followed by Jimmie Johnson in 2nd, Eric Jones in 3rd, Joey Logano in 4th and Martin Truex Jr rounds out the Top 5 in 5th place.

There are still 282 laps to go; so the running will probably change few times over. That is if the weather allows them to actually finish the race today.

Are you going to watch?

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