My feeling in looking at this mid season tournament is that the ratings will be decent, depending on what NFL teams are doing. The semifinals/finals are 12/7 and 12/9 (Th/Sat). This is the weekend after NCAA FB championship games (weekend of Army/Navy game) and the NFL has no Saturday games yet , but Pittsburgh plays New England on Thursday night football.
My guess is that the Saturday ratings will do pretty well for NBA ratings in December.
The regular season games that count toward the seeding of the tournament are Tuesday/Friday, so again, it looks like they are avoiding the NFL and most NCAA FB.
While I don't think the casual NBA fan will tune in to watch other NBA team games, they might tune in to watch their own team's group play and the quarterfinals.
I guess one interesting thing is that if your team doesn't make the quarters/semis, other games are "scheduled" at that point. I'm not sure how that will work, but we'll see.
If Aggie football is doing well, I probably won't care that much. If they already have 4 losses before the calendar turns to November, I'll probably be much more into the NBA tournament.