Brain Scalabrine and Mike Gorman called the game from a studio in Burlington, Mass.NBAE/getty images
NBC Sports Boston analysts Brian Scalabrine and Mike Gorman called the Christmas Day broadcast of Celtics-Raptors "from a feed in the NBC Sports Boston studio" instead of in Toronto due to a "combination of late notice and logistics," according to Chad Finn of the BOSTON GLOBE. A network spokesperson said that it "could not fully staff the game because of the timeline and the relatively short notice on finding out it could indeed carry the game." The Celtics-Raptors game was part of ESPN and ABC's Christmas Day package, but NBC Sports Boston did "not find out the NBA would peel away the network's national exclusivity on the broadcasts" until a "couple of weeks ago." Scalabrine "served as the color analyst" alongside Gorman, "just as he has on road games" since returning to NBC Sports Boston in '14. Finn noted it "certainly seemed as if Scalabrine and Gorman were coming to you live from Scotiabank Arena." Gorman said "more than once" during the broadcast as they cut to commercial that they were broadcasting from Burlington (BOSTON GLOBE, 12/28).
SCARING TREND: The WALL STREET JOURNAL's Benjamin Mullin wrote TV ratings for NBA games are "down 15% so far this season," which is a "drop that the league and its TV partners attribute to injuries that are keeping some of the NBA's biggest stars on the sidelines." According to Nielsen, NBA games on national TV "drew an average of 885,000 viewers in the U.S. in the first eight weeks of the season ... compared with about one million over the same period" in '18 and 1.2 million in '17. The ratings drop has "raised eyebrows among analysts who follow the world of traditional TV, where live sports are one of the few remaining reliable drivers of viewership." LightShed Partners Media & Telecommunications analyst Rich Greenfield said, "Everyone is fighting a very, very difficult underlying trend, which is less people subscribing to TV. And of the people who are subscribing to TV, they're watching less and less every day" (WALL STREET JOURNAL, 12/28).
