Must-See NBA-TV A Bit Fuzzy on NBA Development League Draft
MAJORBLOGS.NET - The National Basketball Association Development League 2007 Draft, or the NBA Development League Draft, or the NBA D-League Draft or the D-League Draft, or the hey-isn't-that-the-NBDL-still draft or the NBA-has-a-minor-league? Draft, depending upon who you catch, was a success, albeit a bit fuzzy one. 
Huge points to NBA-TV for broadcasting the D-League Draft and trying to stage it with the same look and feel of other top-quality NBA-TV productions.
Unfortunately, it looked like the whole shebang was handed off to the second stringers in look and feel. They had title cards with some players names, others were wholly absent. They had photos of some, but not all players. More important, they didn't even feed the player's position to the D-League prez, Dan Reed, as he was calling out the draftees.
Calling out center Jamaal P. Ballplayer would have been much better than waiting for Marty and Ryan Blake, the NBA scouting directors doing color commentary, to mention it in passing.
I would assume that they would have assumed that the show was putting up the information, but since it wasn't, they became the only source of information about something so basic as WHERE THE GUY PLAYS on the court.
The Blakes were the highlight of the evening, although a good sports television director could have briefed them and draft host Rick Campbell a whole lot better.
Calling players out for their lack of conditioning probably isn't the smartest thing to be broadcasting to the audiences in the markets where the D-League plays. It's something an NBA scout would observe, but you want to sell seats, or at least anxious D-League owners do.
I could have done with a bit more honesty about the chances of actually signing these picks as well. D-League third round and down may find that the CBA, overseas, or the IBL/USBL offer more playing time. Remember that these are augmentative picks to existing D-League benches of players already fighting to get time on the court.
Only two clubs have one-on-one relationships with NBA organizations. The rest of the teams are like a crowded Pakistan tenement apartment building: Two and three clubs to a bench with five on the floor doesn't offer as much showcase time.
Also in the TV-director-gets-a-knuckle-wrap department, some prep for the host, Rick Campbell to look like he wasn't born yesterday might be a good idear. Campbell made comment that, prior to the D-League, there really wasn't any player development system like this.
I know that, other than Marty Blake, the average age of the people working the D-League seems to be a youthful 18, but find anyone over 30 to prep them who knows something about sports and they might remind you that the CBA, before the dark days of Isaiah Thomas tanking the league and causing commissioner Stern to form the NBDL, was the precursor to the D-League. The CBA put several hundred players into the NBA, including some of its biggest names.
People at the NBA don't like to mention the CBA these days, particularly since it is still lurking out there as a competitor, but since the NBA "acquired" the Idaho Stampede, Dakota Wizards, and the Sioux Falls Skyforce from the CBA to expand their league, and folks from the former CBA markets are watching the broadcast, showing the Continental Basketball Association, the oldest pro league in North America, its props, might not be such a bad idea.
The draft on NBA-TV was totally out of sync with the coverage on the D-League's web site. While Campbell is selling the ongoing third round with commercials, the webbies at the NBA were moving on to the fifth round, sending the big media ball of the draft flying off the audience rim instead of into the net. Folks with the laptops were watching the fifth. Campbell's call of the third was old news to all but the NBA fans without a laptop.
That's what I thought got in the way of a very good draft. The Blakes' analysis, honesty and all, was top-drawer, and made the show worth watching. I like Dan Reed's enthusiasm. He wants to make the D-League a top-flight sports entertainment product worthy of a Triple-A classification. I'm looking forward to seeing what he can do to make that happen.
Instead of running three hours of the road to the D-League, then the draft, though, how about getting fans excited about the players by spending a little money and doing some preview pieces of the top ten or fifteen candidates, and extend the live coverage of the draft a little longer by juicing up fans for what they're going to see this year, not the reality show from last season.
Last note: The D-League has taken a very hard Westward turn away from the really stupid market picks of the original NBDL on the Eastern seaboard. Still, most of the NBA teams and their fans from the East are very disconnected from the D-League clubs. Starting the draft at a compromise time between West Coast and East Coast zones that helps bring in more people from New York, Boston, Philly and Miami before prime time might be a good way of encouraging the Eastern owners, who are a bit less sanguine about the D-League's value, to see more fan interest from the major league level in the product.
My shiny two.
See the full NBA D-League Draft 2007 at MLN Sports Zone, with comparisons to 2006 and to the recent CBA 2007 draft.
Brian Ross
in Basketball, Sports Business
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