One of the few advantages of having to miss events like the Super Bowl and NBA All-Star Weekend (that pesky pneumonia again) is getting to see how they're covered by the league's respective in-house networks. Today, on NBA-TV, live from Houston, we get the announcement of the Hall of Fame finalists, the All-Star players and coaches' interviews - and, hold onto your seats, the practices by the Rookie-Sophomore Challenge participants.

Meanwhile, live footage of the American woman who showboated her way out of a gold medal in the snowboard cross? Nah. (By the way, does this make Lindsay Jacobellis the new Leon Lett? More important, is Lett now off the hook after 10 years?) In defense of the family of NBC networks (as they say), MSNBC is showing the competition right now, and the USA-Sweden women's hockey semifinal just ended a little while ago on the USA network. (SPOILER ALERT ... SPOILER ALERT ... The Americans lost.)

Actually, even while acknowledging the NBA-TV and NFL Network's insular, self-promoting coverage, wouldn't it help the Olympic coverage to at least have an outlet for post-competition interviews and press conferences? Don't you want to hear, as it happens, what Jacobellis has to say? What Bode has to say about his slip-ups? The women's hockey team? ESPN can do it for big events, and so can the in-house networks, but we're pretty much at the mercy of whatever NBC wants to show us tonight. After the hockey game ended, USA immediately went to, I swear, a rerun of "JAG.'' If the big network and the Games themselves think "JAG'' is a better programming fit than an extra half-hour of live coverage, then why should we viewers care that much?

Back on NBA-TV, a third consecutive Pistons player is being interviewed by the network hosts, which past experience tells me that they're not in great demand from the horde of reporters in the ballroom where the mass interviews are taking place. Kobe Bryant and LeBron James, meanwhile, probably can't even move their arms, they're pinned in so tight by the mobs around them. That might be a microcosm of the first half of this season, but you'll have to read Sunday's paper for more on that.

Blog-gramming note: I'm counting on my vast network of correspondents in Houston for updates on the weekend. First update, unanimously agreed-upon by everyone who's checked in: the traffic is out of control already. Everyone made the same complaint two years ago when the Super Bowl was there, when visitors swore they wouldn't go back for another one unless the city implemented a full-scale mass transit system. Not much progress there since, apparently.