If the NBA wanted a 77-year-old Tony Kornheiser to watch its in-season tournament championship, it should have put it on “real TV.”
The New York Knicks beat the San Antonio Spurs to earn the honor of 2025 NBA Cup Champions on Tuesday night. And yes, you would have needed to watch the game on Amazon Prime Video to witness the Knicks call themselves a champion of anything for the first time in more than 50 years. Unfortunately for the NBA, or unfortunately for Kornheiser, he missed what was an exciting game because he refuses to watch basketball on a streaming service.
“I’m not gonna be watching because I don’t even think it’s on real TV. I think it’s on streaming TV. And I’m not getting streaming just to watch this game,” Kornheiser complained on Pardon the Interruption. “Look, it’s an invented tournament, it’s meaningless to me. It may be meaningful to other people, not to me. People sat around in the NBA offices and they said, ‘Let’s have an in-season tournament because this is what soccer does.’ And the NBA looks at soccer’s global draw and says, ‘This is what we want…’ And that’s fine. It’s fine if you want to watch it, the winner will be forgotten by Friday.”
Kornheiser might think it’s the NBA’s loss if he wasn’t tuned into the in-season tournament championship Tuesday night, but he is not the demographic the NBA was chasing when they sought to have a major streaming partner with its new media rights deals. And there’s no way Kornheiser doesn’t have Prime Video. He may not know how to access it, but he has definitely watched Thursday Night Football at some point in his house.
You can bemoan the tournament as nothing more than an invented tournament. But when you see the players get into it like they did, when you see the Knicks celebrating and the Spurs walking off the court with their heads down, when you see a trophy presentation and championship shirts, it means something. And yes, there will be a banner, as there should be. The Los Angeles Lakers hung a banner in the rafters, as did the Milwaukee Bucks, and so should the Knicks.
An NBA Cup championship banner doesn’t mean as much as an NBA Finals championship banner, we all know that. No one is kidding themselves into believing the Knicks just erased their more than 50-year championship drought, but if the players care about the Cup, and they play a little harder during the tournament, then it means something. 20 years from now, the NBA Cup will mean more than it does today, and the teams who won it in the early years deserve to have banners.
But someone who doesn’t even consider Prime Video to be “real TV” will never buy into the fact the NBA Cup is a real tournament. And that’s OK. Because it’s not the 77-year-old who refuses to watch a sporting event on streaming that the NBA is trying to sell the tournament to.
About Brandon Contes
Brandon Contes is a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. He previously helped carve the sports vertical for Mediaite and spent more than three years with Barrett Sports Media. Send tips/comments/complaints to bcontes@thecomeback.com