Oscars vs. NBA All-Stars: What to Watch on Sunday Night?

If at some point on Sunday night you read a tweet that LeBron James just posterized Billy Crystal, you will either think I have gone insane or realize that I am just as confused as millions of you, forced to click between watching the NBA All-Star Game and the Oscars.

With all the buzz surrounding this NBA season, it almost feels like the Association doesn't even want the casual fans to watch this year's game. Putting the game—putting any live televised event—on against the Oscars is completely and utterly defeatist. And stupid.

Outside of the Super Bowl, Oscar night is one of the true must-see events on the television calendar. Yes, the ratings have been dipping in recent years, but even though last year's event, inexplicably hosted by Anne Hathaway and the detestable James Franco, was down 10 percent from 2010, the show still pulled in more than 37.5 million viewers. 

Last year's NBA All-Star Game averaged 9.1 million viewers, with that game held the week before the Oscars. Putting the game up against this year's Oscar telecast has to impact the number of people watching. It has to. 

That realization makes one wonder what the purpose of the NBA All-Star Game really has become. 

I spoke with ardent NBA fans this week who don't watch the All-Star Game, citing the same reasons NFL fans don't watch the Pro Bowl—the game is nothing more than a meaningless exhibition with no defense.

But the NBA All-Star Game was never really for the ardent fan. The NBA All-Star Game (or any All-Star competition for that matter) is more to give casual fan an opportunity to see the game's greatest players all on one surface at the same time, in an effort to remind us exactly how talented our professional athletes really are.

Why, then, would the NBA put this event up against one of the biggest attention-grabbing, casual fan-stealing nights of the year? Why make the casual fan decide between watching celebrities running up a court or sauntering down a red carpet? 

Maybe the NBA doesn't actually care. Last year, the ratings for All-Star Saturday Night were almost as high as the game itself. Maybe the NBA uses the actual All-Star Game as a means to an end to highlight their skills competition the night before. Do not be surprised if the ratings for Saturday night out-draw the ratings for the actual game this season. (Though, to be fair, if the NBA really felt this way it would probably do more to ensure more well-known commodities enter the dunk contest each year.)

Twenty years ago, the All-Star Game used to capture enormous television audiences. Yes, games back then were on during the day when kids like me (wow, that makes me feel old) could actually watch the game and then go out onto the streets, driveways and playgrounds of America and pretend to be their favorite All-Stars (I was "Thunder Dan" Majerle…on an eight-foot rim). 

Somewhere along the way, daytime ratings became less valuable than prime-time ratings, and the NBA did what most sports have by moving their marquee events to a time when more people are supposedly on the couch in front of their televisions.

After the lockout, the NBA All-Star ratings were mediocre at best, similar to the rest of the league. But in the last five years, NBA ratings are on a huge up turn. There is more interest in the NBA now than at any point in the last decade. In a way, this recent lockout has actually done the opposite of the lockout in 1999. With a truncated schedule and high-profile games on every single night, this lockout has actually created more interest in the league this season.

On Sunday, the NBA is essentially burying its own product.

I know some people will argue the audience for the NBA All-Star game isn't the same as that of the Oscars. Those people might be right…but they are also wrong.

The Oscars aren't about the movies or the awards or the fancy dresses as much as they are about the celebrities in movies who win awards and wear fancy dresses. Celebrity is what draws people in to the Oscars; the NBA All-Star Game is really no different. 

Well, fine, the celebrities in the All-Star Game are wearing shorts and tank tops instead of fancy dresses, but the game isn't as much about basketball as it is the celebrities who play basketball. 

Sure, the majority of ardent NBA fans probably don't care about an award show, but the NBA shouldn't be using the All-Star Game to pull those fans into the telecast anyway.

The NBA has a great product and should be using the All-Star Game solely as an avenue to show more casual sports fans just how great it is.

There are 313 million people in America, about one third of which will be watching television at some point on Sunday night. Even if the Oscars have a bounce-back year and Billy Crystal, George Clooney and Brad Pitt can pull in more than 40 million viewers, that still leaves another 75 million people who are watching something else. Yes, the NBA can pull its nine or 10 million viewers from the non-Oscar watching part of the population. It just doesn't make sense to settle like that.

Even if only 15 percent of the Oscar audience is a potential cross-over crowd for any big sporting event and half of that crowd might be tangentially interested in the NBA All-Star game, that's still an additional three million potential viewers.

Sure, that number of crossover fans seems small for the Oscars to really worry, but for the NBA, that's more than 30 percent of last year's viewership numbers.

Now, this whole rigmarole is not to suggest the NBA won't get a good rating on Sunday, and certainly I'm not offering the opinion that the Oscars will suffer because of the All-Star Game. Nielsen has a neat trick where they count any viewer watching for at least six minutes of a show, so if you tune in to the All-Star Game for a few minutes between awards being given, you, me and everyone in the country will count as watching both.

Funny how that works, isn't it? So, the ratings should be just fine for the All-Star Game, even with the event up against the Oscars. It still makes you wonder why the NBA would do it. Of course, it could be worse. They could have put the game on during the day, against the Daytona 500. (I am suddenly left wondering which event has more crossover fans with the NBA. It actually might be the Oscars.)

Keep your remote handy on Sunday. Just don't get your Clooneys and your Kobes (or your Pitts and your Pauls, if that's your pleasure) mixed up.