The NBA yanks its cord a little more

Bird a Blazer? Magic running the Clippers?

I signed up for NBA League Pass for the first time in 2000, paying for a setup DirecTV doesn’t offer anymore: League Pass and NBA TV and nothing else. They didn’t offer it back then either, I just ordered it that way.

No basic programming, no music, no CNN. No NBA on NBC, ESPN, TBS, or TNT. Those channels were supplied by the co-axial left dangling in my basement apartment in Chicago’s Roscoe Village, which offered a package of stolen cable television if you plugged it into a television and didn’t tell the cable company.

I had two TVs going at the same time, League Pass fed into the 26-inch, the rest into the 12-inch, two VCRs running (which comes in handy when Tony Soprano launches into ‘Dirty Work’ out of nowhere). League Pass cost $149 for the 2000-01 season, paid out with installments. This coverage did not include the price of those VHS tapes, re-recorded upon over and over and over during nights I was out bartending.

The DirecTV did have pay-per-view access. I know this because late one morning I woke up with my contact lenses in and a hangover on, realizing I’d paid money some six hours earlier to pass out in front of the film ‘Made,’ featuring Jon Favreau.