Hawks and Philips Arena CEO Steve Koonin said he would “radically change the schedule” if he could be NBA Commissioner for a day. In a one-on-one interview with THE DAILY’s Abe Madkour to close out the ’17 AXS Ticketing Symposium, Koonin joked that today’s headline would read that he “wants to take on baseball,” but he laid out his reasons for the hypothetical schedule shift. Koonin: “I would start around Thanksgiving or early December and I would go straight up against baseball in July. For three weeks, when we’re in our ‘pennant race,’ we are preempted on our principal network by March Madness. I would move away from NFL and move toward summer. We’re an indoor sport. … The demography of the NBA is different than baseball.”
Koonin: “There’s an old fallacy about media by some of the dinosaurs that you can’t get eyeballs in the summer. ‘American Idol’ proved that wrong. The Olympics proved that wrong. The NBA Finals prove that wrong. So I would love to see us playing in the summer. … When you look at the power of college football, college basketball and the vacancy of professional sports in late spring/early summer, I see an opportunity.”
See more of Koonin’s conversation in today’s issue of THE DAILY.
