High Drama Doesn’t Bring Matching Ratings

Midnight at the oasis ...

I think this is what Finals were like in the good, old days, although it’s hard to remember since there haven’t been a lot of competitive series recently with much appeal.

With big stars, a memorable turning point and the Dallas Mavericks and Miami Heat tied going into Game 5 tonight, this is almost like the good, old days with only one thing missing ...

The audience.

With Shaquille O’Neal, Pat Riley, Dwyane Wade, Mark Cuban and the Heat’s Game 3 rally, TV ratings are up only about 10% over last season’s seven-game mud-wrestling competition, when the San Antonio Spurs averaged 87 points, the Detroit Pistons 86 and their 8.2 rating was the second-lowest since the Finals got off tape delay.

In TV, it’s axiomatic that the later you start, the better numbers you’ll get. The time everyone has arrived at is 9 p.m. Eastern, which is 6 on the West Coast.

Of course, ABC’s “coverage” that starts at 8:30, Eastern time, is what used to be called the pregame show. After rehashing and otherwise talking you silly for 30 minutes -- remember, this has been going on for a day or two on all media outlets -- they talk you sillier for 16 more minutes.

Then the game, which lasts two hours during the season, drags on for 2:45, and the next thing you know, it’s the other side of midnight.

Nor is it safe to assume that people going to bed in the most populous time zone are offset by people in the West blowing off the family for dinner to tune in.

“Not if the Lakers aren’t in it,” says talk show host Dave Smith of 1540 the Ticket, who was on in drive time before his show went national on Sporting News Radio.

“Isn’t that what TiVo’s for?” Smith asked. “I never watch sports events live anymore. I haven’t watched a commercial in a year and a half.”

The Super Bowl, which now starts at 6:15 p.m. in the East, always had box office ratings and has not taken the standard 50% drop from its highs in the 1980s.

Meanwhile, “Monday Night Football,” the World Series and the NCAA basketball title game have seen ratings plummet.

Between glimpses of a dazzling future with NBA Performing Arts Academy and the International Basketball Assn., David Stern, the visionary of the commissioners, is again patiently explaining to Earthlings that everyone’s ratings are down because of cable TV, the Internet, etc.

Nevertheless, Stern told Fox Sports Radio, “When we started the deal with ABC, we moved the start time [to] 8:30 p.m. and our ratings were really poor.”

Give me that again?

That agonizing 2003 Spurs-New Jersey Nets Finals laid an egg ... in the first year on ABC ... which did no regular-season games ... and little cross-promotion since it had little other sports programming ... and had no clue about how to put on a basketball game

Whatever happens, you can’t blame the Heat or the Mavericks for not putting on a show. The Heat battled back from oblivion. The Mavericks have Cuban and the emerging, or erupting, Coach Avery Johnson.

Perhaps aware the media are reading his Blog Maverick, waiting for him to go off, Cuban hasn’t posted since Wednesday and has kept a low profile. He hasn’t ripped anyone in the media, presumably having realized that works better for the media members than it does for him.

Cuban didn’t even surface to denounce the Jerry Stackhouse suspension, merely replying to queries by e-mail and leaving it to Johnson to decry it as “foolishness.”

Actually, it was, although it wasn’t “inconsistent,” as the Mavericks claimed. The league now regularly banishes key players from its biggest games, even if they have already been punished with flagrant fouls, as Stackhouse has been, or ejections, as Miami’s Udonis Haslem was in the first round.

Not that this should come as a surprise, but these teams have had enough of each other. The Mavericks complained bitterly about Stackhouse’s suspension.

Riley was upset that the Mavericks were upset. Riley didn’t even like their saying the series had become “physical,” which he took as code for saying the Heat was getting away with rough play.

“That adjective is being used to motivate other people, you know, that’s what it is,” Riley said. “Either motivate his team or motivate the officials or motivate somebody other than us, OK?

“We took our two losses in Dallas and came home. We weren’t down there after those losses talking about anything else other than trying to regroup in silence. So everybody handles it differently.”

In one of the more animated sessions the Finals has ever seen, Johnson sputtered, “Really and truly, I never want to cry ... and I don’t like using other players’ names, all right?

“You guys go back and look at the first play of the game, all right? Their player, Player A, came over and just pounded Dirk [Nowitzki].... I wasn’t crying about a flagrant foul, all right? It was an elbow to Dirk’s head.

“But we make the same attempt [to be physical] and then my player gets suspended. So now because I’m supposed to be a religious man, I’m supposed to come in here today and have a prayer meeting.”

Player A is O’Neal, who, the Mavericks contend, is allowed to flatten everything in his path. Lakers fans will remember this as every opponent’s perspective, a ploy or both.

Win, lose or draw, Johnson has put an edge on the Mavericks they never had.

Actually, he’s kind of like the young Riley who raged at his Lakers for two days after the Celtics wiped them out in the 1985 Finals opener, turning the series, the rivalry and Laker history around.

Complaining of a “vacation mentality,” Johnson pulled his team out of its downtown hotel, just over the causeway from South Beach, and set it down in Fort Lauderdale, 30 miles north.

Even Riley never did that, although he did try to seal off his players on the top floor of their hotel in the Detroit suburbs in the 1988 Finals -- bringing in food, a pool table and a big-screen TV -- to avoid the lobby when he found that the “Monsters of Rock” tour was staying there too.

Now we have not one but two ticked-off teams. Dallas is down a man, but they had more men when it started.

Sounds even as even can be. Just be glad if you’re in the Pacific time zone.