NBC is making it way too hard to watch the U.S. men's basketball games live

Come on, NBC.

This is the Morning Win. For the next couple of weeks, we’ll be writing each weekday morning about the Tokyo Olympics. Subscribe to get irreverent and incisive sports stories, delivered to your mailbox every morning.

The U.S. men’s basketball team kicked off its run in the Tokyo Olympics yesterday with a disappointing loss to France that had many fans crushing the team for suffering their first Olympics loss sine 2004.

But during the game lots of fans had another problem – trying to find the game on their TVs.

NBC has made a business decision to put the U.S. men’s basketball games on Peacock Premium, their streaming service that requires a monthly payment of $4..99. On their website they tout a bunch of great content that you can watch on their free Peacock service and at the end mention about the $4.99 upgrade to watch men’s hoops.

Nothing says Olympics like a big company digging into your pockets for money so you can watch the Olympics!

U.S. men’s hoops is the only sport that is on the premium service. There are some other ways to see the games live, as some fans pointed out to the Athletic’s Richard Deitsch that you can watch on the Olympics app by verifying your cable service and password and jumping through a few hoops.

Also, NBC later aired Sunday’s game on TV which is dumb because it’s 2021 and everyone already knew what happened in the game.

NBC trying to get subscribers to its premium service during the Olympics is equal parts gross and greedy. These basketball games should be shown live and for free on main NBC. We shouldn’t have to hunt around for ways to watch it on an app or shell out more money to a streaming service that we’d likely cancel after the Olympics are over.

I know what you’re thinking, too – we didn’t miss much yesterday because the team was dreadful in its loss to France. But that’s what makes this team interesting! Since pros started playing in the Olympics we’ve mostly seen the U.S. teams roll to big victories (except in 2004 when they took home the bronze).

This year’s team had some struggles leading into the Games and now has to rebound from an ugly opening loss. It will be fun to see how they regroup and how they respond to the challenges they’re going to face later down the road in Tokyo.

But it’s not going to be fun trying to watch these games live.

Thanks, NBC. Good stuff.

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