Okay, so I kept wondering about this for a while. Why on earth do NBA games start so darn late? I mean, I like watching basketball, but staying up past midnight on a weeknight, it gets rough, you know? My sleep schedule was getting messed up.
So, I decided to actually figure it out, or at least try to understand it from my end. It wasn’t like some big research project, more like me just piecing things together from what I see and what makes sense.
First thing I did was just look at the schedules consistently. I noticed the East Coast games usually tip off around 7:00 PM or 7:30 PM Eastern Time. That’s not too crazy, feels kinda normal for evening entertainment. People get home from work, eat dinner, then maybe catch the game.
But then you got the West Coast games. They often start at 10:00 PM or even 10:30 PM Eastern Time. That’s 7:00 PM or 7:30 PM Pacific Time. So, for the folks out west, it’s the same deal – right after work, prime time for them.
That got me thinking. It’s all about the time zones. The NBA wants the maximum number of people watching, right? Especially for the big national TV games.
So, a game starting at 7:30 PM ET works great for the East Coast and Central time zones. But if they started all games earlier, say 6 PM ET, folks on the West Coast would still be at work or stuck in traffic (it’d be 3 PM PT!). They’d miss a huge chunk of the potential audience.
Then it hit me – it’s the TV networks and the money. They pay huge amounts to broadcast these games. They want them on when the most people can possibly watch across the entire country. That means starting early enough for the East Coast but late enough that the West Coast can tune in after their workday.
- East Coast prime time (roughly 8 PM – 11 PM) is key.
- West Coast prime time (roughly 8 PM – 11 PM PT, which is 11 PM – 2 AM ET) is also important for those later games.
So, those 7:30 PM ET games capture the East/Central audience. And the 10:00 PM or 10:30 PM ET games? They capture the West Coast audience just settling in, and they hope enough hardcore fans or night owls on the East Coast will stay up.
Thinking about the Doubleheaders
I also noticed those national TV doubleheaders, like on TNT or ESPN. They usually have an early game (around 7:30 PM ET) followed by a late game (around 10:00 PM ET). They can’t really start the second game much earlier, or it would overlap too much with the first one ending. They need that buffer time for post-game chat on the first game and pre-game stuff for the second.
So, basically, my little investigation, just from observing schedules and thinking about who’s watching where and who’s paying for it, led me to this: It’s mostly about maximizing the TV audience across different time zones, especially for the networks paying the big bucks. They schedule the games to hit prime viewing hours on both coasts as best they can.
It kinda sucks for my sleep sometimes, especially when my team plays out West, but I guess I get why they do it now. It’s a business decision, plain and simple. Doesn’t make staying awake any easier, but at least I stopped just being annoyed and figured out the likely reason behind it during my evenings trying to catch these games.
