Brian Hendrickson: As both sides bicker, fans still blacked out

You may have heard the excitement bursting out of the Rose Garden this week.

Perhaps it was a Greg Oden slam that caught your attention during preseason game highlights, or maybe it was a Rudy Fernandez lob dunk. Talk of a Portland Trail Blazers playoff run might have invaded your conversations this fall, raising your interest in checking out the renewed Blazermania.

But if you’re a satellite TV customer, what you’ve heard may be all you’ll get.

Yes, once again the Blazers are approaching a season in which their primary broadcast partner — Comcast SportsNet — will not be carried by a single satellite provider, leaving many fans in the dark once again. In fact, almost no progress seems to have been reported.

Plenty of fingers have been pointed, though, while the basic message has remained stagnant. The Blazers will tell you they have no control. Comcast will say the satellite companies are being unreasonable. And the satellite companies will tell you the same about Comcast. So after a year, a message needs to be sent yet again to all parties involved.

End this squabble, for everyone’s sake.

Get the deal done.

Oh, sure, each side will surely respond with reasons for why they are not at fault.

They can come armed with figures about programming costs and operating budgets, and how the other side’s demands are too steep.

Even Blazers president Larry Miller tried to deflect the issue when he lightly pointed the finger at the satellite companies during the team’s media day two weeks ago. He said the Blazers examined other similar markets and decided the price for which Comcast was asking was “fair.”

Of course, he declined to name the markets that were examined.

Besides, fair has become a hollow term now that a year has passed. Just how much time is needed to strike a deal that is “fair?”

What all sides need to understand is that nobody is coming out on top as long as this issue lingers.

The Blazers’ fan base — which the franchise has worked hard to recover — suffers because tickets at the Rose Garden are now scarce, and games on CSN are available on only a few cable systems.

Satellite companies suffer because customers become disgruntled, and could choose to change their service. And CSN suffers because it is losing out on a potential audience.

Hey, it’s understandable for each party to want to negotiate the best deal for its company. Nobody should fault that.

But a year?

The time frame has made this dispute inexcusable. But when the heat is turned up once again, you’ll probably hear familiar defenses, like the issue is not as simple as everyone thinks, or there’s more involved than just Blazers games.

What these companies need to respect, though, is that fans and potential viewers don’t care about the problems of bickering corporations.

They don’t care about who is at fault.

They care about basketball.

And for a year, this blockbuster deal that the Blazers once held up as a significant achievement for the franchise has offered them nothing.

If a tectonic-paced Congress can work out a $700 billion bailout package in less than two weeks, shouldn’t a year be sufficient to negotiate sports programming?

So be fair to everyone guys, and just get the deal done.

Brian Hendrickson is the Trail Blazers beat writer for The Columbian. Contact him at 360-735-4538 or brian.hendrickson@columbian.com. Read his Blazer Banter blog at columbian.com/sports/blazerbanter.