The best time to score against a good basketball team is when their starters are on the bench. Whether the big guy's in foul trouble or the point guard just needs a breather--either way, their absence represents an opportunity. Winning teams takes advantage of such chances.

If the telecom industry was a basketball tournament, a couple of top teams may have just benched some key players. Despite protests to the contrary, it is hard for me to see how SBC Communications and Verizon are going to keep their eyes squarely on the ballgame in front of them, while they pull mega-mergers on the side.

The success of the two deals, SBC/AT&T and Verizon/MCI, will hinge on how effectively each pair of companies comes together. The integration so often touted as a primary benefit of merging can be easily botched--remember Worldcom--such that the new entity not only doesn't emerge as a trim competitor ready to take on all comers, but gets so internally focused in the process of merging that it loses ground.

SBC has gone down this path before. When its acquisition of Ameritech was announced, new initiatives at the Midwestern Bell company ground to a halt, employees became uncertain of their future, and, many critics say, even some basic network operations were ignored. By the summer of 2000, SBC had a crisis on its hands as service quality was plummeting and state regulators were heating up. It took months of investment, including bringing crews in from other states, to get things back on track and there were other hidden costs as well.

In Illinois, the fallout was a state telecom bill that severely disadvantaged SBC, and ill will even now with consumers.

Companies live and learn, and no doubt there are now teams of people engaged within all four players to address the internal merger challenges.

Even so, this is the opportunity that some competitors may have been waiting for.

Bill Capraro, CEO of CIMCO, an integrated communications company, is certainly licking his chops. CIMCO already competes against AT&T, MCI and SBC in providing managed data services, primarily in the Midwestern region.

"We started in 1985, so we were born and bred competing against monopolies," he said. "I look at the merger as an opportunity. For businesses today that use AT&T, they have to wonder who is there to answer the phone, who solves my problem, what happens when the people assigned to my account are cut. They are talking about 13,000 jobs.

"We have almost no turnover, so we're not re-educating people," Capraro said. "We think we offer better products and better prices so the merger will bring in more opportunity for us."

I suspect similar conversations are going on in team huddles--oops, I mean offices--of other competitors nationwide.

Email me at cwilson3@primediabusiness.com.