I have been having an absolutely horrible time trying to watch NBA games online this year. I’ve been a League Pass subscriber for three years now, and have had no trouble with the digital access, but this year has been a nightmare. It took Verizon 6 weeks to let the NBA know that I had in fact paid to watch the games. Now I have access, but it only works correctly on my tablet, not my Chromebook nor my Chromebit. I do have a laptop it works on, but since the Chromebit is already connected to my TV, and will be connected to the TV in our rental house in Florida, I really, really want to be able to get the games in the Chrome OS.

After talking to NBA support, who basically told me, “too bad, we aren’t supporting the Chrome OS this year,” I decided to tackle this with my browser inspector. Turns out, there is actually nothing wrong with the games, only the links to the games. Once you know what the game link is supposed to be, you can hand enter the URL and click enter. Once I figured that out, I also figured out that from www.nba/games, you can basically reload the default URL that you redirect to, and the player will appear. Seems like reloading should have been the first thing I tried, but I’m too happy to be embarrassed. So far, I’ve only done this on my Chromebook, and only watched recorded games, but I will be trying a live game on the Chromebit tonight.

For those who are technically inclined, I will recount just a bit of my efforts along the way. One thing I did early on with the inspector was to change the html of the page, basically by locating a div with a long class name that included the string “no-league-pass”. I deleted that portion of the class, which helped not at all until I also constructed a link following the pattern I saw in the URL field to match the game I actually wanted. Neither the calendar links nor the game buttons were working. However, after I had successfully browsed to a different game, and then checked again to see whether I would need to edit the class every time I want to watch a game, I discovered the merely reloading the page that /games redirects to, I can remove the no-leaguepass class and everything magically starts to work. I think there is just a problem with the way the redirect is working that somehow fails to detect the fact that a subscriber is logged in. I’m going to try to help the NBA fix this bug, or at least let other users know the work-around.

Here’s how a game link looks: http://www.nba.com/games/20161102/CHIBOS?left=true#/video. Edit the date and the city codes, and you can browse directly to the game you desire.