Sports Radio KJR AM 950 started airing some live broadcasts of Portland Trail Blazers games in Seattle this month in hopes of finding find an untapped market of Blazers fans in northern Washington, the Seattle Times reports.
The first broadcast of the seven planned aired Feb. 6. Sports radio stations like KJR face a bit of a rut between football and baseball seasons, so it seemed like an opportune time to explore Seattle's interest in the NBA.
“Obviously, our Comcast games already get played up there on TV, so we felt that there was a good match," Dewayne Hankins, a senior vice president of brand strategy and digital for the Trail Blazers, told the Seattle Times.
While some might consider the potential market more mythical than untapped, Hankins and his team did research to find out 13 percent of single-game ticket sales for the Blazers come from the Seattle area, and that residents up here contribute to a lot of the team's website traffic as well. The Blazers broadcasts come just as the NBA considers changing the rules that restrict teams from marketing past a 75-mile radius of their home turf. Some exceptions have already been granted to the Blazers since there are no competing teams in the Pacific Northwest, but an actual change to the rule could lead to things like Blazers billboards and newspaper ads in Seattle.
