The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Broadcasters try to make audience feel close to action
In the third quarter of a recent Philadelphia 76ersLos Angeles Lakers game, the teams exchanged flagrant fouls. LeBron James shoved Joel Embiid out of midair with two hands, sending him crashing down on his tailbone; Embiid, on the other end, planted his elbow on Anthony Davis’ nose. As Davis got ready to shoot free throws, players held deliberations, reenacting the plays and arguing over whether they had been judged too harshly or not harshly enough.
“I’m here for all the chatter tonight,” said Doris Burke, who was calling the game for ESPN.
It was the kind of action that, as much as the tight score, suggested an extra weight to the game. Championship aspirants doing a little early-season mettletesting. But the attentive viewer might have noticed that the mood was incomplete, and not only because the game, like most in the NBA this season, was held in front of empty stands.
“I miss being close enough to the floor to maybe catch a word or two,” Burke said from her coronavirusprotocol-compliant perch high above the Wells Fargo Center floor while Davis shot free throws.
“You’re not kidding,” agreed Mike Breen, who was handling play-by-play duties.
The sequence summed up the challenges the pandemic has introduced to their profession — first in last season’s bubble and now across 29 arenas. Broadcast teams either call games remotely (as TNT has done all year to this point, and ESPN has done with a subset of its games), or whisk quickly in and out of buildings, with Zoom interviews replacing pregame stopand-chats and sideline views giving way to faraway workstations. And as network executives suggest that some of the new logistics may remain even after a return to normalcy, announcers search for the best way to call a game away from the court. How do you make an audience feel close to the action when you aren’t particularly close to it yourself ?
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The best announcers, at heart, are hosts. Breen’s “Bang!” — delivered when a player caps an escalating series of high-difficulty buckets with a late dagger — gives fans on sofas a dose of the in-arena thrill. Burke’s breakdowns of after-timeout plays and pivot-foot placement offer the advantage of having a seat close enough to see such nuances, and a basketball mind keen enough to pick them up.
The realities of the pandemic, though, have made the illusion harder to maintain. The Disney World bubble introduced certain types of distance, with no fans at games and announcers working from walled-off booths high above the floor. This season has brought more still. Cavernous home arenas, with scatterings of spectators at most, emphasize the emptiness.
Technology has helped minimize the issues for remote broadcasts. Networks have goosed up their talent’s at-home Internet, keeping signals as clear as possible, and direct video feeds between the play-byplay announcer and analyst help compensate for the loss of in-person glances and shoulder taps. Constant communication among directors, producers and camera operators helps get announcers the shots and intel they need. At-home mixing boards let broadcasters manipulate the volume of their partner’s voice or the piped-in crowd noise in their headsets, to best approximate the real thing.
“It’s way different, but honestly, I’m enjoying the collaboration,” said Brian Anderson, who has spent the season working games for TNT from his Wisconsin home.
The demands of the new normal have caused industry veterans to rethink the basics of the trade. In the bubble, they would gather for meals and swap strategies; techniques had to be tweaked and habits adapted. Anderson has drawn on his experience calling minor league baseball, where fans often numbered in the hundreds, not thousands.
“I wouldn’t dare lay out” — stop speaking to let the crowd reaction come through — “because it just sounded sad,” Anderson said of those midweek games in Wichita.
Breen, decades into his NBA career, has found himself studying his own tape more than he has in years, gauging how his approach fits the current environment.
“I’ve always used the fans as part of my calls, and now that’s gone,” he said.
In place of the crowd’s roar is a vacuum that now needs to be filled. The 30second pause that might have followed a “Bang!” in years past has been trimmed to five. It falls to the broadcasters not only to frame the excitement but to generate it, a task better suited to 20,000 attendees than one voice and a microphone.
“Sometimes you walk away and wonder: ‘Was I screaming too much? Did I not have enough energy?’ ” Breen said. “You’re just so used to the background music.”
While play-by-play announcers recalibrate their voices, analysts retrain their eyes. When they call games from home, their views of the court are beholden to the angles obtained by camera operators.
“When you’re there in person,” TNT’s Grant Hill said, “you’re watching the game, not the monitor. You’re watching facial expressions, body language — the court action can be on one end, and you can look over to the coach on the other end. You take it all in. ... That’s different, as great as the views are that are provided for us.”