Nuggets Star Aaron Gordon addresses the Comcast-Altitude Dispute, says how it’s affected Players’ All-Star Chances

22/02/2024 Raymond Basketball 0

More than 90% of households in the Centennial State have missed out on local Avs and Nuggets games since 2019 due to the apparently never-ending carriage dispute between Comcast and Altitude TV.

Colorado sports fans are not the only ones suffering from this issue. Athletes in Colorado also have concerns. In an X post over the weekend, Denver Nuggets star Aaron Gordon expressed his outrage about the blackout and speculated that the absence of television coverage may have prevented Nuggets players—particularly point guard Jamal Murray—from being selected to the NBA All-Star team both this year and in previous years.

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“Bout dis…first we could start by playing our own games on TV in our local market,” Gordon wrote on February 17 in response to a post about comments he made on the subject three days earlier to Nuggets reporters.

“I don’t know why that is,” Gordon said on February 14, responding to a question about why Denver has only one All-Star (via DNVR’s Harrison Wind). “That’s a mystery to me. Doesn’t make any sense.”

One Nugget Yet again

Despite the team having several well-known players and an NBA championship, Nikola Jokic is the only Nuggets player to have been chosen as an NBA All-Star by fans, the media, and current players over the last ten years. Voting for All-Star starters and bench players is conducted with half of the vote coming from fans and the other half being evenly divided between media and active players.
Denver, which is now ranked No. 18 in Nielsen’s Top 100 television markets, has long been one of the NBA’s smallest TV markets. The Nuggets placed last in local household ratings and viewership during the 2021–2022 season, per a Sports Illustrated article that used Nielsen Media Research. The team’s ratings increased by 200 percent in 2022-2023 and are now up 139 percent for the 2023-2024 season, per the Sports Business Journal.

And still, Denver went another year with just one All-Star.

“If y’all think JM27 [Murray] not All-Star caliber you’re tweekin,” Gordon posted on X on February 17.

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While the former Orlando Magic phenom has never been named an All-Star, he definitely knows a thing or two about All-Star Weekend — throwing down one of the most legendary NBA Slam Dunk Contest performances of all time in 2016 against Zach Levine.

“I probably could’ve got second in this years dunk contest lol,” Gordon wrote in a separate post on February 17, poking fun at the fact that he came in second against Levine and second against Derrick Jones Jr. in 2020, despite many people thinking he won both contests. After all, Gordon has the most perfect scores in dunk-contest history.

Denver stars on the Comcast-Altitude Beef

While the Comcast-Altitude verbal jab from “Mr. Nugget” is one of the loudest we’ve heard so far from a player, it isn’t the first time a Denver star has spoken up on the topic.

Even Denver’s former mayor, Michael Hancock, has had some choice words for Comcast and Altitude in X posts of his own.

“We gotta find a way to get our games everywhere,” wrote Murray in a May 2021 post.

Gordon’s time as a Nugget has been marred by the Comcast-Altitude controversy since he arrived in the Mile High City in 2021. By then, the blackout was two years old.

Since August 2019, Comcast has not allowed its subscribers to view Altitude TV due to rapidly increasing broadcast prices. In the 48 counties of Colorado, Comcast is used by 92% of cable users, according to court documents. Additionally, Stan Kroenke owns the local media rights to both the Colorado Avalanche and the Nuggets, which are controlled by Altitude, the television station owned by Kroenke Sports and Entertainment.

“As much as the fans are frustrated, no one is more frustrated than myself or my father in this matter,” Josh Kroenke, son of Stan Kroenke and Nuggets president and governor, said last October. “We’re trying to figure out a resolution, because we want to show the best teams in the leagues, and we have the Avs and the Nuggets.”

Altitude sued Comcast in 2019 on the grounds that it had broken antitrust rules by attempting to eliminate Altitude. Although the parties reached a settlement in May 2023, the broadcast beef has not been formally resolved.

Comcast asserts that providing Altitude to subscribers who don’t want to watch the Avs or Nuggets will be too expensive. Comcast spokesman Leslie Oliver tells Westword, “We remain open to proposals from Altitude that would put consumers and fans first and allow us to make the games available on our platforms to those who want to watch them without raising rates for all of our customers.”