A thread to talk about NBA Podcasts / Personalities / Announcers / Shows / Broadcasters / Commentators

Richard Jefferson on Simmons had a lot of great Cavs drama gossip

gotta check that

Ethan Strauss joining the Athletic might be enough to push me over the edge to sign up.

Hey nerds listen to the basketball movie podcast my sister has started doing w her friends

https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/film-court/id1393865270?mt=2

Subd. I’ll check it out

Thanks; please thinkfluence all your friends so she becomes extremely successful.

breens greatest calls

Mike Breen Greatest Calls: A Thread pic.twitter.com/BeehE5aItT

— Ike (@ManILoveOhio) July 16, 2018

cant wait for this show

“I still regret giving my 14-year-old my name.” - @KingJames

This and more real, unfiltered conversation with @OBJ_3, @mavcarter, and more in UNINTERRUPTED’s unscripted series THE SHOP.

First episode dropping 8/28, exclusively on @HBO. pic.twitter.com/zIoxEgBnJn

— UNINTERRUPTED (@uninterrupted) July 26, 2018

Shams leaving Yahoo for the Athletic.

SVG joining ESPN

Our Andrew Marchand reporting Stan Van Gundy expected to join ESPN as studio analyst. Would love instead to see Mike Breen paired with the Brockport boys - Jeff and Stan https://t.co/tZQeTl3K3S

— Marc Berman (@NYPost_Berman) September 28, 2018

they gotta let those guys do a game together at some point.

For sure

my fav hoops pod rn is brian windhorst's espn pod w/ the other espn basketball ppl. it's basically the old truehoop podcast but w/ all good/smart writers and no "personalities" like amin or the more talk radio-ish guys that used to be on the truehoop pods. windhorst is kind of a garbage writer but as a moderator of conversation he's good bcuz he is very very knowledgeable about the league.

i listen to it cause brian is good but i actually hate the combinations of guests who rarely seem to have any chemistry. other than bontemps whose grumpiness i enjoy they can be a drag.

it's a little worse now bcuz jackie macmullan is out... sometimes it's a weird crew. kirk goldsberry in partic is not very good.

yeah he's awful.

windy is cool enough. he knows a lot for sure, seems really plugged in. i havent listened to his pod recently ill get back into it. dude lacks any sense of humor tho.

windy has a sense of humor but like any good midwesterner it's extremely dry.

espn shuffling nba countdown again:

SOURCES: BEADLE, PIERCE, BILLUPS OUT AT ESPN’S “COUNTDOWN”

only Jalen is staying on

i like chauncey, paul is awful obvs

jalen, u cant fire jalen

chauncey is fine just boring. beadle seemed fine? idk the whole show needs to be re-thought. try something totally different.

that show is really and truly wretched... jalen actually is prob the only good one

honestly i really enjoyed scott van pelt's coverage of game 5 on his special edition of sportscenter they should just give postgame to him

beadle seemed really disengaged most of the time. none of them had any chemistry.

agree. i love the final sportscenter with ScottVP. great format

yeah its good

players only is done.

Via sources: TNT will no longer air the Players Only NBA broadcast. Turner Sports will likely do some Players Only content but as far as games for the 2019-20 season, the Players Only broadcast on TNT is no more.

— Richard Deitsch (@richarddeitsch) July 24, 2019

a not-bad idea that was horribly executed.

i did enjoy some players only broadcasts but when it was bad it was insufferable... they also did it too often. would've liked to see them tweak a bit but oh well

yah you both are otm. kinda wish they tried to hone it to a good spot and adapt it rather than dump it completely but the naysayers were pretty harsh on it from the start.

i think they'd just need to be more selective about the scheduling... it was a cool vibe for those middle of the season thursday night west coast TNT games that are like blazers vs rockets or whatever. but sometimes they'd get a good game where you actually wanna hear real announcers and it would be like, why'd anyone think this was a good idea

by good game i mean big game

yeah there was one where there was some crazy shotmaking going on between two good teams and i think on a big go ahead bucket greg anthony was like "well that was a really nice look there ... well executed" or some monotone platitude and all i wanted was a breen BAAAAANG or w/e

yup all otm

Matt Barnes is the future imo

barnes is good breaking down the game and what not from the little postgame and The Jump clips ive seen but not sure about entertaining for a 2.5 hour broadcast. its really a hard skill, even the best at it get bad after a while (van gundy).

an idea for players only would be to rotate different guys in and out like a quarter at a time or something

Players only being gone is good but questionable stuff is going on. They got rid of The Starters, Kamla gone. Seems like cost cutting for no reason.

yeah wonder what their plan is, if anything

Ros and Fratello out at nba/tnt

Fitz as Hannity I’m guessing because on his (recently canceled) radio show he would defend literally everything the warriors org did and would just really go over the top praising Myers/Jacobs/Kerr etc

oh duh i totally read matts post wrong thought he was talking about jim barnett. fitz is a goof yeah.

Main issue with Fitz on KNBR is that they lost the Warriors rights to 95.7, so it was less of a natural fit having him on the network. Radnich "retiring" plus Greg Papa moving over just made it a good time for housecleaning. They absorbed Fitz's co-host Rob Brooks into Tom Tolbert's show, which has been pretty bad so far.

Rod* Brooks

yeah I was irrationally bummed by the knbr shakeup

Russillo leaving ESPN for the Ringer

So...the news is out. I’m headed to @ringer
Want to thank @espn for the last 14 years.
I grew up on @SportsCenter and then to be on the actual set, my name on a show...have to remind myself at times how cool that is
Excited to try and limit Celts talk to 30mins w/ @BillSimmons

— Russillo (@ryenarussillo) August 6, 2019

he didn't already work for the ringer?

he did dual duty but now it seems he’s going to be exclusive to the ringer

I like russillo a lot, he’s a pretty independent thinker, does his homework, and is funny. he’s always right on the edge of being arrogant and being in on the joke. he’s either a thoughtful meathead or the reverse, can’t really tell for sure

love him yeah. he's the best bill guest for sure, they are pretty in sync when they do their pod

wtf is lowe’s problem, i haven’t listened but heard he was dissecting luka’s fouls like the zapruder film

hes got bristol brain, baby, incurable

dallas never led or even tied lol

i forwarded past the those first two segments of the luka fouls and the celtics cold snap where he seemed depressed over the whole sitch, and now hes cheered up and is complimenting the celtics saying he always believed in them shouldve started that way then dug into the details after, weird stuff

dallas never led or even tied lol

― call all destroyer, Thursday, June 13, 2024 12:59 PM (fourteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

they were up the whole first half!

no i meant in the famous run following the 21 point lead

Haven't listened to this Lowe-cast, and honestly probably won't.

I had the same experience others had upthread with his Finals preview, where he started with a capital-S SERIOUS "WHICH TEAM HAS MORE AT STAKE?" question. Then he was pre-emptively super-defensive about the question itself, then started talking about some dumb shit that Perk said on TV. Had to shut it off!

I listened to his podcast religiously from like 2017 to 2022 but I feel like something changed around then that I can't quite put my finger on.

Maybe I don't really feel like I learn anything from him anymore, plus he's like 20% more manic and shticky than he used to be. And the constant mentions of what his ESPN TV colleagues think, as has been covered well upthread.

I tend to skip to the guest with TLP but I like his guest segments a lot. They usually have room to talk, whereas THC is the same ten jokes over and over mixed with small servings of very good analysis.

xp manic and schticky is right, he also talks way more than he lets the guests talk. he usually has some good points buried in there but it’s a lot.

it is really weird the whole groupthink that developed over the course of this season where somehow the team that was by far the best team in the nba all regular season by any objective/statistical measure was somehow not the favorite the win the championship

people saw the 2021 jazz and the 2022 suns and have now overcorrected into thinking the statistically strongest team is always a paper tiger

also boston playing in the weaker east was a factor, even though they went 23-7 against western teams during the regular season

i don't think it was misguided groupthink to say that denver should have been considered the favorites. i think at any point in history any title team returning their starting 5 of guys all still more or less in their primes has had a claim to being title favorites. and if denver played boston in a 7 game series maybe they would beat them

yes Denver for sure I was more thinking of how people across the board were picking Dallas

Yeah, it's totally fair to have had the Nuggets as favorites to repeat. That said, I do think a lot of people saw Boston's regular season success as a mirage on some level. I mean, more than half of the ESPN experts picked the Mavs to win this series

well…I think it was also a bit of a case of not understanding basic probability. even if the nuggets were the best team this year, which is arguable, they still had to make their way through a loaded west to even have the chance to play the celtics in the finals. you can hypothetically be a 3-1 favorite three series in a row and you’d still be well under 50% to make it through all three.

I do think the celtics were the best and most complete team, but their road to the finals was probably historically easy…something that’s been more or less the case for east champs for 25 years now. at some point someone should do something about this imo…

and it turned out it wasnt just the celtics path to the finals that was easy, the finals was easy too

yeah I don’t want to get too much in the business of discounting individual championship runs, the celtics have def earned it this year. but there’s a pattern that seems like it’s bad for the league esp now that lebron is out of the east/irrelevant

on the other hand in the aforementioned 25 years, the east has gone 8-17 against the west

it would be more fair and also more entertaining to de conference the league imho

needs to happen at some point