This was the headline in an article published by the seattletimes on Sunday. Normally it is not our style to criticizes journalists – they are all doing a good job, but this has to be corrected. First of all I don’t understand why a newspaper in Seattle talks about a German guy from Dallas at all. I mean Detlef Schrempf’s time in Seattle is well over (as a player)!
To me this article sounds a little bit like a story that was written without actually being in Germany or knowing the important facts to write an article like that.
Although he’s the NBA’s returning most valuable player, the Dallas Mavericks’ 7-foot forward remains a story Germans don’t really understand.
So what is not to understand about a guy that plays Basketball in the United States? Germans do play basketball and Germans also know where the United States are. Considering that not one GM gave Dirk a vote to defend his MVP title he isn’t that big of a deal anymore anyways, right?
“To understand Nowitzki’s profile here, you have to understand that he is probably the single most popular athlete still active in Germany, but that very few people see him play,” said Marcus Nick, the editor of Basket Magazine, Germany’s most popular basketball publication. “Nowitzki is basketball in Germany, but the three most popular sports are soccer, soccer and soccer.”
“the single most popular athlete” that “Germans don’t really understand”? That doesn’t make sense to me at all. First of all soccer is the most popular sport in Germany, why isn’t a soccer player like Michael Ballack the single most popular athlete then?
The Mavericks and the NBA are barely an afterthought on the German sports scene, featured on the satellite Premiere system, which has an estimated 4.5 million subscribers (for movies, sports, news and children’s programming), in this nation of 82 million.
A Premiere spokesman said the company doesn’t disclose viewer numbers but said that it’s happy with NBA viewership. NBA games often are broadcasted in the early hours of the morning (7:30 p.m. in Dallas is 1:30 a.m. in Berlin). When those games are on, they feature Dallas more often than not.
First of all the time difference between Dallas and Germany is not 6 hours – unless Dallas moved to the East coast. I also think it should be clear that Premiere is PAY TV and not free. So you can compare it to comcast or something like that. So if you want to watch a NBA game you have to get up at 2:30 in the morning and pay for the extra service. I also checked for viewer numbers – which are published in Premiere’s media data as allesaussersport tells us. He points out that about 7,500! viewers follow the LIVE games on Premiere in average.
Do you think that 0.2% percent of the Premiere subscribers is a reason to be happy?
Well at least the author of the article did not call him “Nowintzki” – as I heard some Americans say Dirk’s name before..
