By With NBC seemingly poised to return to the NBA for the first time since 2002, there has been much discussion of nostalgia. Did NBC really do such a great job as the NBA’s lead broadcast partner, or did the network simply ride the wave of the Michael Jordan era?
To be sure, there was no shortage of ‘right place, right time’ involved in the success of the NBA on NBC, and once that luck ran out, the network was quick to cut ties, lowballing the league in a negotiation that began literally a week after 9/11. Yet to attribute those glory days to Jordan alone is to ignore the various aspects of NBC’s approach that elevated the league as a television property.
Perhaps the best way to understand why the NBA on NBC is so well-remembered — nearly 25 years after the network aired its most recent game — is to examine the coverage provided by its successor, ESPN/ABC.
ESPN’s botched rebuild
Sunday’s Pacers-Knicks Game 7 was an emperor-has-no-clothes moment for the NBA on ESPN. When David Roberts assumed oversight of ESPN NBA coverage in 2021 — in the shadow of the Rachel Nichols-Maria Taylor mess — it was not simply a change of executives but of philosophy. Roberts is from the debate show wing of ESPN, running First Take, Get Up! and similar fare. Hence it is no surprise that under his tenure, ESPN’s NBA Countdown — far from beloved in any iteration — has become an extension of those debate shows. The initial retool featured Mike Greenberg of Get Up!, Stephen A. Smith of First Take and Michael Wilbon of Pardon the Interruption. (Greenberg left prior to this season.) ESPN’s own description of the show leads with the words “[b]old opinions, discussion and debate” before any mention of basketball.
Smith had previously been a featured player on “Countdown” (then known as “NBA Shootaround,” or any number of other names), joining the cast in the 2003-04 season and taking on an outsized role that included shouting matches with Greg Anthony and — at one point — a recurring segment in which he debated himself.
That run ended after the 2005-06 season and Smith did not return to the show until the Roberts retool. In the current iteration, Smith — whose profile is higher now than anyone could have imagined 20 years ago — is the undisputed star. The show is his showcase, and there was no more glaring example than on Sunday.
His exaggerated Knicks fandom was a bigger focus for “Countdown” than the actual Game 7 that followed, with ABC even including Smith in the montage of arriving players at the top of the telecast. The final seconds of the pregame show featured Smith giving his usual heightened performance — one would be hard-pressed to buy his act as genuine — alongside Spike Lee. Beyond taking precedence over the actual game, the NBA’s first Game 7 at Madison Square Garden since 1995, it was an unusually bold display of favoritism for a network pregame show.
If the direction leaves much to be desired, there is no question the pregame show needed an overhaul. The game production, on the other hand, did not appear in need of any change. The trio of Mike Breen, Jeff Van Gundy and Mark Jackson had worked together almost continuously since 2007, and while the comedy stylings of “Jeff and Mark” were not always well-received, the broadcast team had taken on the air of an institution. To have the same three voices work across eras — from Duncan and Kobe to the “Heatles” to the “Splash brothers” to Jokic — is a level of stability not to be taken for granted.
ESPN nevertheless laid off Van Gundy and Jackson in the offseason, promoting Doris Burke and adding the one-time ESPN analyst Doc Rivers. Highly acclaimed during his brief stints at Turner and ESPN/ABC, Rivers’ arrival would help paper over the loss of Van Gundy and Jackson.
While Rivers settled back into his TV role as if no time had passed, he, Burke and the returning Breen had barely begun to establish any chemistry when he abruptly left for the Milwaukee Bucks coaching job in January. That left ESPN having to plug in J.J. Redick at midseason — and to try to build chemistry on the fly for the second time in one year. While Redick is clearly an adept basketball mind (a reason why he may be the next to leave for a coaching job), the mesh with Burke and Breen is taking time. There has been steady improvement just this postseason, but thus far, the new team has yet to reach the level of the old. Change for the sake of change has only harmed what was once ESPN’s best NBA asset, its lead broadcast team.
Other, more cosmetic, changes have also left much to be desired. ESPN never had an NBA theme song as identified with the league as “Roundball Rock,” but its “Fastbreak” theme by Non-Stop Music had gained familiarity in the nearly 20 years since its Christmas Day 2004 debut. It too was changed two years ago, replaced by a theme that — if catchy — lacks gravitas and runs at a sluggish, almost funeral pace in comparison to the speed of an NBA game. As recounted to The Ringer in 2020, when he was developing “Roundball Rock,” John Tesh made sure the music matched the pace of an NBA fast break.
The Gee Whiz school
Now contrast ESPN’s NBA production with that of its long-ago predecessor. NBC was not perfect. Its version of Stephen A. Smith was Peter Vescey, who was never as big a star — or focus — but brash and bombastic in his own right. Its pregame struggled to find its footing and, by the end of its 12-season run, engaged in a failed effort to replicate the magic of TNT’s “Inside the NBA” with Jayson Williams as Charles Barkley. (No need to discuss how that ended.) The network never completely ignored ‘small market’ teams like the Pacers, but it had its obvious favorites. Finally, Ahmad Rashad remains clearly beloved within the NBA and among viewers of that era, but using him as a lead sideline reporter was a rare spot in which NBC then was inferior to ESPN now — which uses Lisa Salters, a journalist with a hard news background, in that role.
Yet if ESPN’s NBA mission statement can be summarized by the words “bold opinion, discussion and debate” appearing before any mention of basketball, NBC’s mission was basketball, basketball, basketball. The NBA has never had a greater, more shameless hype-man than NBC. Critics of the NBA often describe ESPN as ‘shoving the league down their throats,’ but ESPN merely talks about the NBA incessantly. That is not the same thing as praise.
In the early days of sports journalism, there was a “Gee Whiz” school of sportswriting that exulted in athlete’s triumphs and treated the games with a reverence that bordered on excess. In the “Gee Whiz” model, as paraphrased by the scholar Jon Enriquez, “every player was legendary and every contest was immortal.” This was the school of Grantland Rice, he of the “four horsemen.” The NBA on NBC maps cleanly onto that model.
Sunday’s Pacers-Knicks Game 7 is as good an example as any. Here is how NBC’s Marv Albert set the stakes for the previous Game 7 between the teams in 1995:
They say it’s what athletes dream of: playing in the seventh game. The final game of a series. You wonder if it isn’t something that dominates their nightmares. An entire season reduced to 48 minutes, four quarters, one game. You wonder what Reggie Miller is feeling right now. A few days ago, he boasted of sweeps and chokes. Today, it’s his season that could come to an end. And what of Patrick Ewing? Betrayed by his body, yet still expected to do more than just bring his team back from the brink of elimination. Can he carry them to a championship?
These men, these teams, have been here before. We’ve seen the same emotions displayed, then silenced. Last year, the Knicks battled back to win a seventh game against Indiana to move on to the Finals. Now, a year later, the same two men, the same two teams, it’s another Game 7.
Perhaps a bit melodramatic, yet it effectively lays out the stakes and the historical context for the teams and their stars. This year’s Pacers-Knicks Game 7 opened with Stephen A. Smith yelling about “orange and blue skies” while jostling with Spike Lee, leading into a comparably brief open by Mike Breen:
Madison Square Garden will be packed and loud for this do-or-die matchup. [Sound of fans chanting “Let’s Go Knicks.”] For the Knicks and the Pacers, it all comes down to one game. For one team, a single victory and it’s onto the conference finals. For the other, a defeat means the season is suddenly over.
ESPN is oddly detached from the stakes, oddly uninvested in the players’ journeys and what the game means. ESPN is uninterested in telling the viewer why he or she should care about Tyrese Haliburton — or even Jalen Brunson, really, given most of the network’s Knicks talk has focused on Smith’s fandom.
Breen, who worked for the NBA on NBC, has the experience and skill to write and perform an actual tease. He simply was not given the time, as ESPN deemed it better spent on Smith.
The “Gee Whiz” school of sportswriting was met with no shortage of resistance, and an “Aw Nuts” alternative emerged in opposition. This model was marked by a more cynical eye, per Enriquez, “making fun of the vices of athletes, coaches, and owners, acknowledging the realities of gambling and greed … and suggesting that participants and spectators took sports altogether too seriously.” It would not be fair to suggest ESPN occupies this position — which is more along the lines of the “Deadspin”-era blogosphere and “The Dan Le Batard Show” — but the network is clearly more detached.
For ESPN, the games are not immortal. The players certainly are not; ESPN has spent LeBron James’ entire 20-year career questioning his skill, mettle and worthiness. (NBC sought to create the next Michael Jordan, ESPN uses Jordan as a cudgel with which to diminish every player who came after.) ESPN is a new kind of sports journalism entity, one that has turned the “Gee Whiz” model inward. For ESPN, it is Stephen A. Smith who is immortal, and every “NBA Countdown” rant that is legendary — the kind of self-possession that would have been impossible to imagine when sportswriters were having to moonlight as umpires and statisticians to get by in the 1920s.
Pair that self-obsession with the broader efficiency of this era — a carefully-crafted, meaningful tease takes time to write, edit, and air, while generating no money — and one gets a Game 7 broadcast in which the game is secondary to the network broadcasting it, in more ways than one.
The ‘vision’ thing
That gets to perhaps the core difference between the NBA on NBC and ESPN. NBC had a vision for the NBA that carried from beginning to end. It got the theme song right from the start; by comparison, it cycled through forgettable themes for Major League Baseball and the NFL throughout the 1990s. It got the personnel right; if not for Marv Albert’s 1997 arrest and subsequent court case, he would have been the lead voice for all 12 years. NBC’s first broadcast in 1990 is not dissimilar from its swan song in 2002. There were changes here and there, and even NBC was not immune from the aforementioned ‘efficiency’ — there was considerably less of Jim Fagan’s voiceover in the final seasons, for example — but the NBA on NBC knew what it was from the beginning.
ESPN has cycled through any number of visions for its NBA coverage. There was the Mark Shapiro vision that included a miscast Brad Nessler as the voice of the Finals, an ill-conceived “floor cam,” and Mike Tirico and Joel Siegel previewing the summer movie season at halftime of the NBA Finals clincher. (This was also the era in which ESPN cameras inevitably cut away to, and lingered upon, fans with certain physical attributes.) There was Al Michaels’ two-season run as the voice of the Finals, in which his performance was not dissimilar to his current, sedate run on Thursday Night Football. Finally, there was the era of Breen, Van Gundy and Jackson, after which the network’s coverage stabilized — and even improved — over a number of years.
The Nichols-Taylor disaster, which ESPN created by giving two competitive journalists the same job, choosing one to host the Finals and then abruptly changing its mind midseason, was a setback from which the network has yet to recover. The decisions made in the aftermath of that highly-publicized meltdown have with few exceptions been the wrong ones. Thus, the network’s coverage has been set back almost to the beginning.
There are some ways in which ESPN is a better partner than NBC, all of them financial. ESPN continues to pay massive rights fees and say the right things about the league’s value to its bottom line. Its parent company even hosted the NBA “bubble” in 2020. NBC, on the other hand, was not just quick to exit as soon as the ratings dipped, but was publicly derisive of the league’s falling viewership. At one point in 2001, Variety reported that while the “overall ratings decline of the NBA is bad enough … NBC is particularly concerned about the way the demographic has skewed toward blacks.” (“The bottom-line problem with this disproportionate percentage of blacks,” Variety continued, “is that most advertisers won’t pay a premium for them, even when they cluster in the hard-to-reach 18-to-34 category.”) Even if just as a function of the changing times, it is unlikely one will ever see such a leak from Disney.
As an on-air product, however, there is simply no question of ESPN’s stark inferiority to NBC. Given the network’s longevity — this is year 21 of what will be at least a 33-year partnership, assuming ESPN’s expected extension is for 11 years — the low points span generations.
The nostalgia-fueled anticipation for the new NBA on NBC is no doubt misplaced. The new version, if it comes to fruition, is much more likely to resemble NBC’s Sunday Night Football than the NBA on NBC of old. That is not such a bad thing given the quality of NBC’s SNF production — a spiritual successor to the ABC era of Monday Night Football — but this media rights deal is not going to make it 1997 again through science or magic.
Yes, the Tesh theme will almost certainly return, but Jim Fagan passed away years ago, Marv Albert is retired, and Bob Costas and Dick Ebersol have not worked for NBC in years. Many of the accoutrements that made the NBA on NBC special — from the lasers forming the NBC peacock to Fagan’s voice-of-God introducing the participating teams (“TO-day, it’s the Chicago Bulls versus the Or-lan-do Magic!”) — had been shortened or phased out by the end of the network’s run and are unlikely to return in the new iteration. There will undoubtedly be more ESPN NBA alums on the new version than veterans of the original NBC run, if any return at all. Yet it is hard to blame viewers for retreating into the past given what ESPN is doing in the present.
ESPN in particular, and the industry generally, eschews all of the little things that add to the anticipation of a great sporting event. The stakes, the human drama, the historical parallels — the context that explains why a game is significant — are the building blocks of sports production. This was understood as far back as the days of Roone Arledge. The job of the network is to tell the story sufficiently to earn the viewer’s interest. For ESPN, the biggest stakes on Sunday belonged to Stephen A. Smith. He was the reason the game was significant.
ESPN is not a platform for the game, the game is a platform for ESPN. So long as that is the case, one has no choice but to turn back the clock in order to watch the game as it was meant to be shown.
