They don't know whether to be gun shy or leery. Everybody wants something. They learn through personal experience. Sometimes it's painful. These are growing pains.
Every cycle has growing pains.
But since Jordan's 1999 retirement, the NBA's growing pains have been acute. In 1997-98, Jordan's last season, NBC had a 4.6 rating. Turner had a 1.7 rating at this point during Jordan's last season. Its rating fell to 1.3 last year and is now at 1.2 . But we believe that what we have here is a changing metric for the measurement of a sport's success.