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

and macmahon has been on all save three

oh hm i haven’t been listening as regularly in the offseason but my impression has been they’ve been rotating the third guy for the purposes of previewing particular divisions. I guess we’ll see this week

i think rotating third guy is a good set up, def better than doing an ep a week with no tims

i have a feeling goodwill is gonna be the 3rd guy the majority of the time. he has a good rapport with windy and mcmahon, which is probably the most important quality, and he's been around so he has stories etc but tbh i haven't been super impressed with his hoops opinions

iirc the show originally had a rotating cast, like back when jackie macmullan was on? i'm a big fan of vinnie, i feel like he'll be on the majority of the time, the only other person who i feel like appeared w/ regularity this offseason was anthony slater, who is pretty boring. they also transferred mcmenamin from the lakers beat to the sixers beat and i find him boring & annoying but i bet he'll be on more this year

had to laugh that today's episode previewing the 2026 atlantic division begins with 20+ min of decision era lebron stories

yeah windy always open to talking about bron then the ny guy they had on mentioned that people complain about him covering lebron too much

barkley did who he play for went one for five then they ran it back with the same questions and he went two for five https://bsky.app/profile/ohnohedidnt24.bsky.social/post/3myjg5uhm2s2e

i laughed very hard at that segment. his best one

Ernie announced he's leaving after this year. Might be time to close up shop.

chuck always has said he leaves with ernie so id imagine this is the end

ugh. what a legend he is. gonna miss ernie.

he looks darn good for 70

show should just be shaq alone in a abandoned studio sipping water chuckling

kenny can't run to the video board anymore because he had both knees replaced. they tried to do this thing where shaq was illustrating at the board for kenny as kenny narrated, but shaq kept accidentally standing in the way of the video, and not in a funny way, but in a "this wasn't rehearsed ahead of time and it's just a big waste of air time" way

all's to say that i don't think there's much of a reason for the show to exist in this way except for the fact that every other NBA pre or postgame show is still somehow miles worse than even this severely degraded version of inside

i feel like everyone eulogized them at the end of the '25 season before they had the espn deal, felt like they shoulda wrapped it up then

it seems like they mostly kept the show going for other people -- the staff and crew on the original show as well as fans who didn't want to see it go off the air. but the fit w/ espn was awkward on its face and last season didn't really inspire any confidence that the show is considered any sort of priority in the disney empire. just feels kinda like an afterthought in general, however i still watch bcuz i want to support the only halfway watchable tv studio show in sports

i like the prime crew but they dont have much personality. they have infinitely more than melo/tmac/vince who are frankly just three very boring guys

they are pretty dull

looking forward to Shaq/Kenny/Richard Jefferson/Pat McAfee next year

it’s hysterical to me that the hoop collective, espn’s one NBA podcast, has one sponsored segment and every single time it’s introduced it’s in the clunkiest most janky way possible as if nobody involved has ever heard of the concept of a sponsored segment let alone tried to execute one. gets me every time