Sports Media Watch presents thoughts on recent events in the industry, starting with nostalgia and the new edition of the “NBA on NBC.”
The “Frasier” reboot, now consigned to the relaxation grotto in the sky, looked and sounded familiar. Every episode would begin with an animated outline of the home skyline against a black background, accompanied by a radio jingle. There were the title cards between scenes, eschewing the traditional sitcom combo of music and establishing shot. There was of course the “Tossed Salads and Scrambled Eggs” crooning over an otherwise silent end credits sequence. What it lacked was the writing, the impeccable casting, the comic timing, the reason for existing — any of the qualities that made the original so beloved during its run from 1993-2004.
All of the aesthetic touches in the original were not only new and different in 1993, they had something to say about the character. Frasier was modern, cultured, the ultimate effete elite. The aesthetics matched, whether in his apartment or in structuring the show itself. Compare that to the show on which the character originated, “Cheers” — with its amber-tinted, wistful opening credits sequence and scenic shots of Boston between scenes.
What did the aesthetics connote in the reboot? Frasier did not have a radio show anymore, so why the jingle? He hardly spent any time engaged in his cultural pastimes, so why the title cards? His linkage to psychiatry became surface level, so why is he still singing about “Tossed Salads and Scrambled Eggs”? The only answer is because those were in the original series and people seemed to like it.
One might wonder why on earth a sports TV column would begin with three paragraphs about a canceled reboot, but the takeaway is that nostalgia for the sake of nostalgia risks becoming a poor imitation of the original.
The past several years has seen any number of reboots of beloved NBC series, from “Frasier” to “Will & Grace” to “Night Court.” The latest is the “NBA on NBC,” which during its 12 seasons (one more than “Frasier”) became the NBA telecast of record — benefiting from a confluence of circumstances that will be hard to replicate. Not just the rise of Michael Jordan, who won all six of his titles on the network, but also the rise of NBC Sports into a sports television force on par with ABC in the Roone Arledge era. An NBC Sports led by Dick Ebersol that employed Bob Costas, Marv Albert, Hannah Storm and even for a time Greg Gumbel — all at their respective peaks.
Perhaps most importantly, an NBC that knew exactly what tone it wanted for the NBA and stuck to it. It was not just “Roundball Rock,” or the pregame teases, the announcers, or even the games, but the combination thereof under “one operating principle,” as Dick Ebersol said in his 2022 autobiography:
[T]he idea that the league — the partner — always came first. Every idea we had, every innovation we wanted to consider, every decision we wanted to make, had to first be run through the prism of: Is it good for the league? The league came first in everything; after all, it was “the NBA on NBC.”
That may seem like a fairly obvious statement, but consider how often rights partners make decisions that are not best for a given league — from remote broadcasts during the playoffs to limited television coverage. NBC’s white glove treatment of the NBA was evident in all aspects of the network’s coverage. Storytelling instead of argument, promotion over punditry, a focus on the game instead of the network carrying it. All else flows from there.
After 17 long years with CBS — a partnership that, with all due respect to Brent Musburger, Dick Stockton and company, should have never happened — the NBA entered the NBC era sorely in need of some TLC. Even though CBS had by the end begun to improve its NBA broadcast, most of its run was spent holding the league at arm’s length. Even after losing rights, CBS Sports president Neil Pilson — per Ebersol — brushed off the loss because the future of the league was “in Cleveland and Utah.” (Of course, NBC could have made a gourmet meal out of even a Cavaliers-Jazz series.)
NBC saw potential in the NBA that CBS was never going to tap. The league never had a partner who treated it like a top priority and put the requisite effort into production, scheduling and promotion. NBC changed that.
The new version of the NBA on NBC returns at a similar moment for the league. After 23 long years, the NBA of 2025 needs as much TLC as in 1990, with ESPN/ABC having largely abandoned what made NBC’s run so successful, and both ESPN and TNT analysts having taken the NBA to the rhetorical woodshed on any number of recent occasions.
So what is the one operating principle for the new NBA on NBC? To judge by NBC Sports president Rick Cordella, to make the games seem big again.
“I’m not talking negatively about ESPN or Turner, how they do their coverage of the NBA,” Cordella said to CNBC’s Alex Sherman last week, “but I’ve gotten caught in these rabbit holes on YouTube looking at a Bob Costas narration leading into the Eastern Conference Game 7. Patrick Ewing, Reggie Miller, one man left standing, and you feel like it’s a heavyweight fight, you’re on the edge of your seat — and the laser NBC Sports logo goes on, John Tesh’s Roundball Rock plays through, the NBA on NBC [voice over] with Jim Fagan — all that is part of what sort of made that event feel big. Our goal at NBC Sports is to make big events feel big and be big. So we’re going to bring a lot of that back.”
From the return of “Roundball Rock” to showing pregame introductions and bringing back the dramatic tease, the new “NBA on NBC” is clearly inspired by the old. Yet there is some danger in that approach. If the operating principle of the new NBA on NBC is nostalgia, the reboot will fail like so many others. Instead, there must be a broader purpose behind them.
“Roundball Rock” is a basketball anthem on par with “Heavy Action,” and its absence from NBA games the past two decades has been entirely unnecessary. (John Tesh offered to license it to ESPN/ABC when it began its coverage in 2002, but the company decided to set out on an ultimately failed quest for its own sound.)
Yet “Roundball Rock,” stripped of its context, is just a song. Does anyone get ‘chills’ or feel pangs of nostalgia hearing it before a Xavier-Providence game on FOX, or during a Kevin Hart-fronted gambling ad, or during NBC’s commercial Saturday in which it was being hummed by the stars of Dick Wolf procedurals and Bravo reality shows?
The context that made “Roundball Rock” so memorable was the buildup. “I don’t think a network could possibly do a better job of presenting and legitimately — not hype — legitimately dramatizing a league,” longtime NBA on NBC voice Bob Costas said on the Sports Media Watch Podcast earlier this year. “You know, all those openings that people miss and they hope that NBC reprises them, those dramatic openings, they weren’t bulls**t. They took stuff that was true and amplified it and dramatized it. It was a combination of a form of journalism, but also theater.”
NBC opens were not mere purple prose and evocative music; they dove into the histories of the players, coaches, teams, the league, even sometimes the broader community. For the network’s final open in 2002, Costas compared the soon-to-be-threepeating Lakers to other dynasties in league history, from the Mikan-era Lakers to Russell’s Celtics — and that was no aberration. Ahead of the Bulls’ first title in 1991, Costas’ open chronicled the history of the team and the greats who had failed along the way. It was characteristic of NBC under Ebersol, which to quote Bryan Curtis, “had styled itself as the thinking man’s sports division.”
By contrast, a dramatic open done just for its own sake can lapse into melodrama. Here is how ABC opened Game 4 of the NBA Finals in the first year of the current rights deal — 2003:
After capturing the advantage in enemy territory, the Lords of the East return to their castle, only to let a critical moment slip from their grasp. Those in black unleashed their wrath, defended the high ground, took what they wanted, and left the field of battle. One more notch in their belts, one step closer to the prize. Now the white knights must reawaken their thirst for the Grail and for revenge, and a soft-spoken leader must turn his potential into punishment, his desire into destruction, his vengeance into victory. Retribution must be swift, for there’s a reason they call these the finals.
Light on insight, high on hyperbole.
It is not enough to do these things just for the sake of doing them. To achieve the highest-quality broadcast — which NBC did in its prior iteration — things must be done with a specific approach in mind. To replicate what NBC did in its original run is going to require bucking broadcasting trends of the past 30 years, including setting aside commercial time for what is ultimately, as Costas described it, journalism. In this industry, journalism is a losing horse (literally, if one watched the race on Saturday). Yet it was a crucial component of NBC’s success.
There is a general belief that journalism is bad for leagues, as it tends to uncover unflattering information — and that is to an extent true. But journalism is also the hard work of properly contextualizing the players and the game within a sprawling history, taking the time and effort to avoid simplistic narratives that devolve into mere heckling. If one has a good story to tell, and most sports generally do (at least on the field of play), journalism is putting the league first — rather than taking the easy road of pop star anthems, sponsored segments and “GOAT” debates.
NBC, as Bryan Curtis aptly described, “could promote basketball in the kind of glossy, literate way that made you forget the network was promoting anything. This is sports TV’s sweet spot, that intoxicating mixture of (some) journalism and (a lot of) capitalism, all tied together with a great theme song.”
The standard NBC set in its first run with the NBA is not one that can be replicated easily. The success of this reboot will rely on understanding why the fondly-remembered aspects of the original resonated. Otherwise, “Roundball Rock” on NBC will be no different than it is for a Seton Hall game on FS1.
Plus: NBC NBA studio, ESPN NBA booth
Give NBC’s Ahmed Fareed credit for filling in for Mike Tirico on the network’s Kentucky Derby coverage. The Kentucky Derby is one of the most-watched events in sports, save for football, and Saturday’s edition delivered its largest audience since 1989 (keep in mind all the caveats regarding out-of-home viewing). Fareed kept the telecast on track seamlessly, and to echo Richard Deitsch of The Athletic, it may be time for NBC to consider him for a position higher than second chair. Could he be a contender for the NBA studio? Probably not.
Maria Taylor would seem to be the clear favorite (it did not seem coincidental that she was briefly in NBC’s “Roundball Rock” commercial Saturday), but her tenure as ESPN/ABC’s lead NBA host was unremarkable and ended badly. Lost in the coverage of the Taylor-Rachel Nichols debacle, which overshadowed the NBA Finals when it broke in July 2021, is that neither was as good in the pregame role as Michele Beadle a year earlier. Some of that can be blamed on ESPN, which has yet to produce an NBA pregame show of quality, but one wonders if the obvious choice for NBC is really the best one.
ESPN’s lead NBA broadcast team of Mike Breen, Doris Burke and Richard Jefferson is too consumed with broader narratives surrounding the players, as was evident during Friday’s Rockets-Warriors Game 6. There is more than enough time on studio shows to discuss Draymond Green’s history, and while the role of game analyst is no longer to solely break down Xs and Os, that is still the primary function. The immediacy of the game was lost in a wilderness of storyline and platitudes.
A week ago, when ESPN had Tim Legler work its early game and Burke and Jefferson in its late window, it was impossible not to notice the difference in the quality of analysis. Both Burke and Jefferson are capable of high-quality work, but they stray too far into what Joe Theismann once called an ‘issue-oriented broadcast.’
