Don’t know if you saw it, but tonight the league announced the schedule for Tuesday night’s games. And guess what — the Rockets game against the Jazz will NOT be on ESPN or TNT. It’s going to be on NBA TV! I get the NBA TV channel, but something tells me there are a lot of folks out there who don’t get that channel and also don’t live in Houston where they can watch the local broadcast. So they may be out of luck.

I’d be curious to see if any of you out there are not going to be able to see it at home, or if NBA TV is part of your basic cable package.

And get this: the game will go head-to-head against Game 5 of the Phoenix-San Antonio series on TNT that also starts at 8:30pm Central like the Utah-Houston game. To me, that’s a slap in the face to fans in both Houston and Utah. Both series are at 3-1, so how did they go about choosing what game would go on each network? You would have thought they would have just spread out the games over different days so that basketball fans wouldn’t have to make such a difficult choice.

It only gets worse. Before the 8:30pm games, there will be two other games that will both start at 6:00pm Central: Dallas-New Orleans (TNT) and Philadelphia-Detroit (NBA TV). I think Philly and Detroit fans are getting screwed even more because their series is more compelling to watch (2-2) while the Mavericks-Hornets series is 3-1.

This may just be a way for the NBA to get more people to watch their channel. Just like that fiasco between the NFL Network last season having a big game between Green Bay (I believe) and Dallas that was only going to show on ITS network, leaving fans of both teams who didn’t even have the choice to subscribe to the network out in the cold.

Click here if you want to see the schedule the way Yahoo presents it.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 28th, 2008 at 2:40 am and is filed under 2008 NBA playoffs, vs. Utah. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.