As much as I hate David Stern and the NBA for moving the Sonics, I still enjoy watching the best players during the playoffs. Since I don’t have cable TV, and am often too busy on weekends to catch the network television games on ABC, the last two years I’ve purchased the playoff games online to watch on my PC. Forget about it this year, as the NBA Download Store is closed for business.

To turn this off is just plain stupid for them. It’s like refusing royalty checks for music or books you’ve created. The last two years, each playoff game was available for download one or two days following the live game. To offer this service for a fee simply extended their revenue generation from each game.

The NBA really does have a flawed business model. I hope David Stern continues to screw it up and run it into the ground so everyone can see what an idiot he truly is.

I’m one of those people without cable or dish television service, so I get to miss all the good NBA games. Last year during playoff time, I purchased video of some of the games to download and watch on my PC from http://download.nba.com.

The interface was clunky, the shopping cart system broken at times, but I overlooked that as I was enjoying watching the exciting games like the double-overtime Lebron James extravaganza against the Pistons.

I was pretty certain the NBA would have come a long way with this technology over the last year, unfortunately it sucks just the same.

First of all, it’s playoff time now, and I am ready to jump the gun and purchase the entire playoff series, including the finals. Unfortunately, even though ad banners on the NBA site mention that I can do this, when I go to the downloads site, there is no place for me to purchase rights to view any of the upcoming games. There is no mention of Playoffs 2008. I’m ready, they aren’t.

Second, even just clicking through their site to look at previous regular season games throws “Object reference not set” errors. Sloppy.

Third, the interface hasn’t changed one bit from what it was like last year (searching is difficult, navigation sucks, integration with the rest of the site nill, throws errors).

I find it pretty hypocritical that an asshole commissioner like David Stern who is so concerned about profit that he deems Key Arena in Seattle unacceptable, would completely ignore this revenue stream for an entire year, and make no improvements at all.