The Knicks, after losing 16 straight games, have actually won two games in a row. They have a total of seven wins for the season, and maybe they will actually get to 10.
I predicted that they would finish 13-69, and I still believe that.
Of course, their second win in a row was against the Philadelphia 76ers, a team which has been tanking since Day One and has won a total of eight games, so the two-game winning streak is really nothing to get that excited about.
The Knicks have a chance to make it three in a row against the Orlando Magic on Friday. While the Magic aren't that great a team either, they are worlds away from the 76ers, so it will be a challenge for the Knicks to come out victorious during this game.
But with a two game winning streak under their belts, maybe the worst is really behind them.
The other big New York sports story isn't yet taking place on the court or on the field, but in the backrooms of two major broadcasting entities.
It appears that the Yankees are moving back to WPIX Channel 11 as their over the air broadcast outlet for a slate of games during the 2015 season.
This is huge new to anyone who grew up watching the Yankees on free TV from the late 1940s to 1998, when things changed and the Mets, not the Yankees, were on Channel 11.
The Yankees have been pretty nomadic since then, as their over the air outlets have been WCBS Channel 2, WYNY Channel 5, and WWOR Channel 9, the last of which was the Mets' over the air broadcast outlet for decades.
What made everything so out of alignment is that the Mets ended up on the Yankees' old outlet, Channel 11.
Of course, all of this has to do with YES, the Yankees' own mega-money sports network, which was negotiating these rights with Channel 11.
The Yankees' original pay TV broadcast outlet was MSG Network, the home of the Knicks, but the team saw how lucrative such a station could be, and when their contract ran out, they created their own network, which has been paying dividends since its start.
Now, it appears that 21 games of the team will be broadcast on WPIX, which as I said, is the Mets' home, too.
The Mets have about 25 games on the station, so between the two teams, about 46 games will be broadcast, give or take one or two if the station decides to broadcast the annual Subway Series of games between the two teams, when the teams play each other at mid-season.
Anyway, the other games might pose some logistical challenges, but there has been a precedent that I know of--the Chicago Cubs and Chicago White Sox share WGN, and while the station doesn't broadcast as many Cubs games as it used to--it used to broadcast nearly the entire season on this station--any logistical challenges between the two teams have been worked out, and the marriage between the teams and the station has worked out just fine.
And let's face it, the Yankees don't belong on Channel 9, they belong on Channel 11, and it appears that that is where they will be for 21 games this coming season.
So in my world, the universe is somehow righting itself.
Oh, how I wish the real world could right itself so easily.
Two comments.
ReplyDeleteWithout the late Phil Rizzuto in the booth, is it really that big a deal that the Yankees are on channel 11?
And this year the Subway a Series will be in April 24-26 in the Bronx and September. 18-20 at Citifield.