More than nostalgia: How NBC thrived and how ESPN failed with the NBA!

[FAH1223]

 

[Nero Christ]

It seems that shyt with and Spike yesterday was the last straw and now everyone is unleashing the flutes on espn. They deserve it too and it’ll get worse as we get closer to no more Inside.

 

[jwinfield]

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.

 

[Harry B]

ESPN has a lot of good people but they are more or less background type of people. Analyst that just pops up sometimes and stuff like that. But they are very much peripheral.

The hot takes, trolling, being a media personality and shyt is the front office. And apparently a lot of people like that

 

[Stick Up Kid]

Before reading the obvious would be

-ESPN took a "hot-takes" approach, focused on LeBron too much
-Stephen A Smith was a cartoon character

NBC had icons like Bob Costas, dikk Enberg, Steve Snapper Jones, Bill Walton, Marv Albert, etc.
NBC had the goat production

and lets be real.. 1990s was a far superior product and brand than the current NBA.

 

[2Quik4UHoes]

It isn’t just ESPN, it’s the very money hungry pivot that things took when the whole “Next Jordan” marketing model went crazy. I think that also drastically affected how ESPN ended up approaching things.

 

[KidJSoul]

Great article

 

[concise]

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.”)

WOW

 

[Rekkapryde]

WOW

But cats want NBC back so badly


Jordan carried that shyt and nikkaz loved the roundball rock theme




Hopefully ESPN steps their game up.

 

[concise]

But cats want NBC back so badly


Jordan carried that shyt and nikkaz loved the roundball rock theme




Hopefully ESPN steps their game up.

Some of the other quotes in the source article are also wild.

NBA dribbles toward dicey TV contracts

The National Basketball Assn., fresh out of slam dunks, couldn't have chosen a worse time to begin negotiations for a new long-term TV contract.

variety.com

But Jerry Solomon, a TV sports consultant and former president of SFM Media, says, “White people are increasingly turned off” by players with gangsta-rap images like Allen Iverson of the Philadelphia 76ers, who sports more tattoos than Ray Bradbury’s “Illustrated Man” and had to be admonished by Stern last season for recording an album filled with profane, derogatory lyrics.

 

[Rekkapryde]

Some of the other quotes in the source article are also wild.

NBA dribbles toward dicey TV contracts

The National Basketball Assn., fresh out of slam dunks, couldn't have chosen a worse time to begin negotiations for a new long-term TV contract.

variety.com

We knew this. That's why Stern pressed so hard for the dress code. Was fukking up the money.

nikkaz WAS lookin wild looking back though.

 

[cartierhoe]

WOW

Which is why it's always funny to me people act like race is never a factor when people talk ratings for the NBA

 

[duckbutta]

How can you even compare ESPN and NBC? Two different networks doing two different things with 2 different goals in mind

 

[FAH1223]

Some of the other quotes in the source article are also wild.

NBA dribbles toward dicey TV contracts

The National Basketball Assn., fresh out of slam dunks, couldn't have chosen a worse time to begin negotiations for a new long-term TV contract.

variety.com

NBC switched up after Jordan retired and the ratings started falling. Ebersol went from Stern's best friend to saying we can't lose hundreds of millions on the NBA.

 

[RickyDiBiase]

ESPN is the FOX News of Sports Journalism