The Pressure is on Lebron James (More TV Ratings)

And not the pressure to win the championship -- although I am sure he puts a lot of personal pressure on himself to win.

For all my talk about the NHL ratings (and again, I've completely swung to thinking current value/health of the league does NOT correlate to the National ratings of the Stanley Cup games), I think the ratings for the upcoming NBA finals will be very interesting. Because of Lebron my guess is the finals will crack averaging over 10 Million homes for the first time since 2004 when Detroit vs. the Lakers pulled an 11.5 average Nielsen Rating and was on in ~12.5 million homes.

What I'm most interested in is to see whether Lebron can outdo that performance by Kobe/Shaq of a few years back.

The relative comparison are of course completely meaningless (comparing NHL to NBA, for example). While my linear brain does want to make such comparisons -- crap like if the value of an NHL franchise is X, the value of the Boston Red Sox must be 25X!

But that really is just a bunch of stupid crap. In the real world it doesn't work that way. In the real world, quite often, as my brother likes to say, the tiniest studio apartment in the most luxurious building will have a higher price per sq. foot than the bigger, "nicer" units. You can't look at the unit that is 4x as big and say it should be worth 4x...because that's not actually how it really works. Not for condos, not for the NBA, not for the NHL.

My mind tried to process it that way anyway, but I'm over it.

Why David Stern and the NBA are Pulling for Lebron

On bent knees baby, on bent knees. I'm rooting for it myself. Why? Well Lebron is certainly the real deal. He has star power. More star power than Wade and an aging Shaq I think, but if he gets in the finals it will put it to the test?

Why? Well, honestly even though Tim Duncan may be the single best team player in all of basketball, he's in San Antonio and either by choice or not, he isn't exuding star power in this way. (You know all of those commercials with the Lebrons? There isn't anything like that with Tim Duncan), but we know how the ratings are when San Antonio is in the Finals...

Here are the past results for San Antonio in the NBA finals (all data courtesy of Nielsen Media):

6/9-23/2005	ABC	7	8.2	15	8,951,000	12,544,000	San Antonio/Detroit
6/4-15/2003	ABC	6	6.5	12	6,955,000	9,864,000	San Antonio/New Jersey
6/16-25/1999	NBC	5	11.3	21	11,205,000	16,014,000	San Antonio/New York

First things first, clearly the NBA misses the New York Knicks not being a solid franchise. Stern probably hopes Dolan has a massive heart attack and decides to get rid of all his business interests which would be good, at least in the case of the Knicks since he's done such a lousy job. But if Lebron and whoever the other 4 people Cleveland puts out on the floor can get to the finals, we'll have an opportunity to see the impact of Lebron. My prediction is it will outdo this:

6/08-20/2006*

ABC

6

8.5

15

9,332,000

12,972,000

Miami/Dallas

Will Lebron crack the 10 million home threshold for the first time since 2002 (Lakers/Nets) when 10.7 million homes tuned in. My prediction: yes. But first they have to get in the finals, like Stern and the rest of the NBA (who aren't affiliated with the Pistons) are hoping. I'm hoping for it too.