The hardest place to watch Denver Nuggets games … is Denver

To John Eckman, the Denver Nuggets’ ascent into NBA title contention is laced with irony.

They’ve never been more must-see. They’ve also never been harder to watch.

At the same time that Nikola Jokić has blossomed into a two-time MVP and transformed a forlorn franchise into a title contender — the Nuggets hold a 2-1 lead over the Heat in the Finals — the network that airs the Nuggets locally has been embroiled in a bitter standoff with Colorado’s largest cable provider. The four-year power struggle between Comcast and Altitude Sports has forced Denver-area fans like Eckman to seek other ways to watch their beloved Nuggets during the regular season.

Last year, Eckman, 58, forked over an extra $25 per month on top of his Comcast subscription for a fledgling Idaho-based pay TV service that briefly included Altitude Sports among its offerings. Then Evoca TV abruptly went defunct last December, sending Eckman scrambling for another option.

Eckman tried using a VPN to circumvent NBA League Pass blackouts without visiting a different region, but the NBA detected his actual IP address and prevented him from streaming Nuggets games. When that failed, Eckman gave up. He refused to ditch Comcast for another provider that carried Altitude but cost more money or offered fewer channels. He resigned himself to catching the Nuggets only during nationally televised games on ESPN or TNT.

“The whole thing is maddening,” Eckman told Yahoo Sports. “Not being able to watch as many games, I couldn’t follow them as closely during the regular season. I could read about them or catch some highlights, but it wasn’t the same.”

The most glaring sign of the impact of the Comcast-Altitude dispute are the Nuggets' disastrous TV ratings. In 2021 and 2022, the Nuggets were last in the NBA in local household ratings, according to Sports Business Journal, despite winning nearly 60% of their games and making the playoffs both seasons. That’s a direct result of at least half the pay-TV households in the Denver area not having access to Altitude’s Nugget broadcasts.

Asked about the Altitude-Comcast impasse last Thursday before the Nuggets hosted the Heat in Game 1 of the NBA Finals, commissioner Adam Silver described it to reporters as a “terrible situation.” Silver added that he has a brother who lives in Boulder and “I hear from him and his family all the time.”

“It frustrates me because I think it's a broken economic model where you have demand and the supply isn't there,” Silver said. “The notion that local fans can't watch the games … It makes no sense. It's on us to fix it.”

What’s happening in Denver is emblematic of the problems plaguing regional sports networks that air sports programming featuring teams from their geographic footprint. The business model is slowly collapsing as cable and satellite providers become more cost-conscious in an effort to retain customers during the cord-cutting era.

In years past, RSNs have been able to charge cable and satellite providers large monthly fees in exchange for the right to include the channel in the bundle that they sell to customers. Cable and satellite distributors for years have balked at paying those fees, only to inevitably relent out of fear that angry sports fans would switch to a competitor.

Over the past decade, as tens of millions of families have stopped paying for cable or satellite TV packages, distributors have played hardball more frequently in negotiations with RSNs. They’re recognizing “this whole business was propped up by subscribers who watched very little sports but had no choice what was in their basic cable package,” says William Mao, senior vice president of global media rights consulting for Octagon.

Cable providers also have more leverage in these disputes than they did before 2019 when Sinclair purchased the 21 RSNs that Fox had unloaded. Fox had the clout, Mao says, to say, “if you want Fox News, you have to take the entirety of Fox’s channels.” Sinclair lacked a similar bargaining chip.

“These channels on their own were very expensive and their performance was dependent on the on-court, on-field, on-ice product of the teams they aired,” Mao told Yahoo Sports. “If they weren’t part of a broader deal that had a couple of jewels that cable operators would want to retain, it made negotiations a lot tougher.”

Diamond Sports, a subsidiary of Sinclair that runs the RSNs, missed four scheduled payments to MLB clubs earlier this year and then declared bankruptcy in March, citing declining revenue. Warner Bros. Discovery, which runs three AT&T-branded RSNs and is a part owner of a fourth, has warned teams it plans to exit the flailing business entirely by the end of the year.

The Kroenke-family owned Altitude that airs the Kroenke family-owned Nuggets and Avalanche has insisted for four years that Comcast and Dish Network are unwilling to pay market-value fees. Altitude says on its website that Comcast and Dish “continue to ignore the wishes of their customers” and “have demonstrated a level of greed that is clearly out of touch.”

Altitude is available on DirecTV and announced a new deal with fuboTV in October, but neither of those carriers has nearly the reach in the Denver metro area that Comcast does. In an antitrust lawsuit filed in 2019, Altitude said that in the Denver media market 92% of cable customers and 57% of pay-TV customers have Comcast. Altitude and Comcast settled that lawsuit earlier this year without resolving their carriage dispute.

Though Altitude has urged Nuggets fans to switch providers, many families aren’t willing to entertain that option. Some can’t have satellite TV because they rent or because the weather conditions at their homes are not conducive. Others, like Eckman, aren’t willing to part with Comcast because the Internet-TV bundle is less expensive or because they prefer to have access to certain channels.

Even those who do switch to a provider that carries Altitude sometimes run into unexpected hassles. Colorado Springs resident Megan Giron says she has gone through four providers since last fall trying to watch the Nuggets.

Optimistic that this would be a special season for the Nuggets with Jamal Murray again healthy and a stronger supporting cast around him and Jokić, Giron canceled her Comcast subscription last October and signed up for Evoca. Then, when Evoca ceased operations a couple months later, Giron moved on to fuboTV. She thought that would be her final switch … until the NBA playoffs began and she realized fuboTV didn’t offer TNT.

The final blow came when she switched to Sling TV but struggled to access her local ABC affiliate to watch Game 2 of the NBA Finals. She and the guests who came over to watch the game had to drive to another house.

“I was livid,” Giron told Yahoo Sports. “Altitude Sports and Kroenke haven’t shown any indication that they give a darn about the fans. Now we’re talking about a championship-caliber team in the NBA Finals, and look what we’re going through to watch them.”

In spite of the TV issues, the Denver market has embraced the Nuggets like never before as the team has marched to the NBA Finals for the first time in franchise history. On May 31, the city renamed a street "Denver Nuggets Way" to commemorate the team's success. A week later, more than 18,000 joyous fans packed Ball Arena for a Game 3 watch party as the Nuggets throttled the Heat in Miami.

And yet Denver sports radio host Zach Bye wonders if the bond between the Nuggets and the community would be even stronger if not for the Comcast-Altitude impasse. He thinks back to when he got hooked on basketball as a kid and wonders whether today’s Denver-area 9- and 10-year-olds had that same chance.

“It’s a lost opportunity to create memories and grow the fan base,” said Bye, who co-hosts the Stokley and Zach show on 104.3 The Fan. “You grow your roots with the team during the regular season and the fact is that 60% of the metro area missed out on that.”

When the standoff between Altitude and Comcast began four years ago, Bye said it was the most-discussed topic in Denver sports media. That has faded over the years as the power struggle has persisted and fan furor has given way to resignation.

Now there’s little optimism among Nuggets fans that anything will change, not even if Jokić and his teammates build on a 2-1 series lead and hoist the Larry O’Brien Trophy. The standoff persisted another year, after all, even after the Colorado Avalanche won the Stanley Cup last June.

“I wish they would provide fans what we want, but don’t have any confidence that it will happen,” Eckman said. “If the Avs winning the Stanley Cup didn’t change anything, this won’t make any difference.”