NBA on DuMont
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For the 1953-54 season, the National Basketball Association began a with the DuMont Television Network. This marked the first[1] year the NBA had a national television contract[2]. The contract had the DuMont Television Network televising 13 Saturday afternoon[3][4] games, paying $39,000 for the rights. DuMont's first game aired on December 12, 1953, with the Boston Celtics defeating the Baltimore Bullets 106-75.
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- ^ The league got its first television exposure during the 1953-54 season on the long-since folded DuMont Network. At the time, baseball was still the national past time and pro football was beginning to emerge as a popular sport in its own right. Even college basketball was considered a The NBA was considered a more attractive television commodity than the NBA. The NBA was considered a minor-league operation at the time, but when the college point-shaving scandals of the early '50s rocked college basketball and left the NBA relatively unscathed, the league began its emergence into the national spotlight.
- ^ NBA NETWORK TELEVISION CONTRACTS
- ^ The DuMont television network would televise 20 Saturday afternoon games the following season.
- ^ In spite of these problems, all of the networks except DuMont regularly aired basketball games, mostly on Saturdays, when three games were often aired simultaneously. The networks, with little previous programming experience to guide them, risked failure in dedicating nine-and-a-half hours of their collective schedule each week to professional basketball. They quickly learned that basketball was not a wise choice for prime-time programming, as it proved to be much less popular than boxing. The game was not yet ready for network exposure, although the development of the NBA and the emergence of such star players as George Mikan and Bill Russell would later make pro basketball a much more popular.
