WHAT might have been the biggest story of the week was right there on TV, Wednesday night, hiding in plain sight.
Throughout MSG’s telecast of Knicks at Memphis, nearly every shot showed rows and rows of empty seats. The most expensive seats, from courtside and roughly 25 rows up, were almost all vacant.
And expensive seats for Grizzlies games are on the NBA’s low side, $100-$200 per. And this was just the Grizzlies’ third home game of the season.
The box score claimed that attendance was 10,129, eight more than the club’s previous game in the 19,000-seat FedEx Forum. But if that were the case, most patrons were seated directly behind the TV cameras.
The Grizzlies, since the Vancouver franchise was resettled in Memphis in 2001, have played to half-empty houses before, but nothing this bad. An eyewitness estimates that Wednesday no more than 4,000 were in the house.
And ba-ba-baby, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
In Sacramento, where the Kings would regularly sell out the 17,300-seat Arco Arena, the home opener was played to at least 5,000 empty seats – and attendance has fallen since. Indiana, Philly and Charlotte are way down, too.
By late spring, you’ll likely hear and read that a couple of NBA and NHL teams are close to suspending operations, unable to make rent and payroll, that corporations that bought arena naming rights and businesses that bought big-ticket advertising are behind in payments. There will be more layoffs than layups, more undertakers and no underwriters.
There will be no new vanity-purchase buyers, no consortiums with which to consort. Even the new reliable among team investors and sponsors – casino owners and operators – are bleeding millions.
It was right there on TV, Wednesday, just behind and all around the Knick game. Beginning of the end or the end of the beginning, there’s lots more less to come.
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Showtime/CBS so much wants Warren Sapp to be the next Charles Barkley that it has turned to forced feedings.
On Showtime’s latest “Inside The NFL,” in the “Ask Warren” segment, Sapp was asked if he’ll watch Keyshawn Johnson’s new reality show about interior design.
“Me, watch Keyshawn on an interior decorating show?” Sapp said. “Keyshawn, I knew you were a bitch. And thanks for making it clear.”
Yep, a hateful and crude street put-down – comparing Johnson to a woman, a lower form of human life – proudly presented, and on tape, in the name of sports on a show carrying the NFL’s logo and license!
It’s not just Sapp, whose sense of social sensitivity is limited to whatever best serves him, it’s also that Showtime/CBS was eager to promote this response, to highlight it in a press release, as if, in Sapp, it has the latest outspoken, irreverent ex-athlete/TV character, as opposed to another low-brow act whom dimwits might confuse as outspoken and irreverent.
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Just Figuring: With ESPN expanding Bobby Knight’s role – he’ll now provide courtside analysis in addition to his studio gig – ESPN’s lengthy “Bobby Gone Wild” highlights reel, once regularly seen, figures to remain under lock and key.
It figured that Wednesday, during his first Devils’ telecast since his Hockey Hall of Fame induction, Mike Emrick didn’t even bring it up.
WFAN’s Craig Carton is yet another professional insult artist who can’t take a punch. That certainly figures. And his sidekick, Boomer Esiason, is now not only drinking from Carton’s vat of sewage, he’s ordering doubles. I never figured on that.