7-year-old writes NBA commissioner letter requesting earlier tipoff for Finals, cites unfair bedtime
One problem with sports on the East Coast is that big games tend to start and therefore run late enough that kids, especially on school nights, can’t watch them in their entirety.
It’s a byproduct of the need to get those events slotted for maximum viewership, which means “prime time” — when the grown-ups have had a chance to get home from work, eat dinner and tend to the household.
One particularly enterprising 7-year-old child is having none of this when it comes to the NBA playoffs.
Since Riley Roussell isn’t going to be able to get his parents to move to the West Coast (where, for example, Game 4 of the Finals tips off at a more reasonable 6 p.m. Pacific time compared with 9 p.m.), he instead took the step of writing a letter to NBA Commissioner Adam Silver.
Riley is the son of Bucknell women’s basketball coach Aaron Roussell.
His request reads:
“Dear Commissioner Silver,
“My name is Riley Roussell. I am 7 years old. I love the NBA. Especially the playoffs. My only problem is some games start too late. Sometimes after 9PM. My parents make me go to bed while they stay up and enjoy watching it. Can you please make the games earlier for kids on the east coast? Thanks!!”
And making matters even better, the dots in those exclamation points were used as the eyes for a drawn smiley-face.
I’ve been worried at how upset my 7-yr old has been with me for not letting him stay up for the games, turns out the NBA commissioner is now taking some heat too pic.twitter.com/7ONDtPoB8J
— Aaron Roussell (@CoachRous) June 7, 2018
There are ultimately three solutions in play here.
One is Roussell’s parents allowing him to stay up late enough to watch the game or, in the manner of so many young children whose Icarus-like reach exceeds their grasp, to have a flying-too-close-to-the-sun moment where they fall asleep naturally and the parents carry them to bed at halftime.
Another is for the NBA to start the games earlier, something like the 7 p.m. East Coast starts that mark games in the regular season. The trouble there is that they then start at 4 p.m. on the West Coast, and as any fan of an East team living out West and watching on League Pass knows, that’s a recipe for butting heads with the boss during the last hour at a 9-to-5, not to mention creating all kinds of problems on the commute home.
And a third is for a West Coast college team to make a “Godfather” offer to Aaron Roussell to come coach there so he can raise his family, further his career and have his son right there with him at 6 p.m. to watch the Finals as a family.
While the NBA bosses doubtless have plenty of television research and max audience hit and everything else in place to tell them exactly why 9 p.m. Eastern is the right time to start an NBA Finals game, young Riley Roussell does have a good point.
After all, the future of any sports property is to get kids into it. So much hand-wringing has been going on in Major League Baseball, where the median age of a live TV viewer is 53, about how to get kids involved; surely the NBA is aware of this as well.
And sure, Aaron could record it on DVR, but show me a kid who can resist the urge to simply jump on the Internet and check the score and I’ll show you a kid who’s been put in a time machine from 1987 or something.
Ball’s in your court, Adam Silver. Help a kid out.
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