The NBA on NBC is the branding used for presentations of National Basketball Association (NBA) games produced by the NBC television network in the United States. NBC held broadcast rights from 1954 to 1962 and again from 1990 (when it obtained the rights from CBS) to 2002. During NBC's partnership with the NBA in the 1990s, the league rose to unprecedented popularity, with ratings surpassing the days of Magic Johnson and Larry Bird in the mid-1980s. Although the main NBC network no longer airs NBA broadcasts, NBA games currently air on the NBC Sports Regional Networks in the form of game telecasts that air on a regional basis, featuring local NBA teams that each of the regional networks have respective broadcast rights to air in their designated market.
Overview
1954–62 incarnation
NBC's first tenure with the National Basketball Association began on October 30, 1954, and lasted until April 7, 1962. NBC's very first NBA telecast was a game between the Boston Celtics and Rochester Royals in Rochester.
For the 1954–55 season, Marty Glickman and Lindsey Nelson called all games except on April 9 (Fort Wayne @ Syracuse during the playoffs), when Glickman worked with Jim Gordon. Nelson would later write in his autobiography, Hello Everybody, I'm Lindsey Nelson that NBA commissioner Maurice Podoloff would travel to the televised games and, when NBC needed to get in a commercial, he would go up to one of the coaches and say, "Call a timeout," and they had to, since the commissioner ordered it. On March 19, 1955, during the playoffs, NBC gave the national spotlight to the New York Knicks and rising Boston Celtics at New York's Madison Square Garden.
For the first year of NBC's tenure, the first five weeks of coverage followed a Canadian Football League game. That contract decreed that the network show 13 games (along with presumably the Grey Cup) on Saturday afternoons beginning in late August, and was signed one week after NBC had lost the rights to NCAA football to ABC.
The following year, Lindsey Nelson was paired with Curt Gowdy on commentary for all games except on February 25 (St. Louis @ New York), March 3 (Minneapolis @ Rochester with Nelson working with Joe Lapchick), and March 24 (Fort Wayne @ St. Louis with Nelson working alone). On March 31, 1956, NBC broadcast the first nationally televised NBA Finals game, which was Game 1 of the Philadelphia-Fort Wayne series.
Gowdy and Nelson were retained as the primary broadcast team for NBC in 1956–57 except on March 23 and March 30 (St. Louis @ Boston), when Nelson worked by himself. While the team of Gowdy and Nelson again did most games in 1957–58, Nelson worked the December 14 telecast (Syracuse @ Detroit) with Chick Hearn, who in return, worked the January 11 telecast (Syracuse @ Cincinnati) with Gowdy. For the January 18 telecast (Detroit @ St. Louis), Nelson worked alone while on February 1 (Syracuse @ Minneapolis), Nelson was paired with Bill O'Donnell. Meanwhile, Gowdy worked alone on March 1 (Cincinnati @ Philadelphia).
NBC also during the 1957–58 season, broadcast a game in Detroit between Cincinnati and the Pistons on March 15. It was after this game, on the flight home to Cincinnati, that Maurice Stokes became ill and later suffered a seizure, fell into a coma and was left permanently paralyzed. This was the delayed reaction from having hit his head in a game three days earlier. Stokes died in April 1970.
In the 1958-59 season, Curt Gowdy worked alone on all games except on March 15 (New York @ Syracuse, when Gowdy worked with Bud Palmer), April 5 (Minneapolis @ Boston with Lindsey Nelson). The 1959 NBA All-Star Game marked the first time that the All-Star Game was nationally televised. However, NBC only broadcast the second half at 10 p.m. Eastern Time, in lieu of its Friday Night Fights telecast. The fact that the All-Star Game prior to this, was almost always played on a Tuesday night meant that NBC would have had to sacrifice most, if not all, of their evening programming. In the first few years, that would have meant taking off Milton Berle's program, which was starting to slide, but still would have made more money for the network than a pro basketball game. Plus, NBA owners weren't terribly savvy when it came to working with TV in this era, so they probably refused network requests to put it in a weekend afternoon slot.