Coverage lacked actual basketball talk
ESPN and ABC’s ratings for Thursday night’s NBA Draft, featuring very special guest star Victor Wembanyama, were stellar.
The same cannot be applied to their coverage.
Per Nielsen Media, this was the most-watched NBA Draft ever on any network, with the first round averaging 4.93 million viewers. Wembanyama, the 7-foot-5-inch generational talent from France, was a no-brainer pick at No. 1 for the San Antonio Spurs. But the curiosity around him made up for the lack of suspense, contributing to a 24 percent boost in viewership from last year’s draft.
The second round, in which the Celtics, after a series of trades, selected Jordan Walsh of Arkansas at No. 38, averaged 1.2 million viewers exclusively on ESPN. That’s a strong number, too.
Executives at ESPN, ABC, and parent company Disney should be thrilled with the viewership (and might want to send the charismatic Wembanyama a thank you note).
But if they believe the high viewership confirms that the programming met a high standard, they must have turned off their televisions and assorted devices and checked out before the lottery picks were complete.
ABC’s broadcast was hosted by Kevin Negandhi, but for all intents and purposes was the Stephen A. Smith show, just like roughly half of ESPN’s daytime programming. I like Smith, who occasionally lets you in on his gambit, in moderation. This was not moderation.
So I opted for ESPN’s broadcast, which featured host Malika Andrews, plus analysts Jay Bilas, J.J. Redick, and Andraya Carter, and reporter Monica McNutt. Adrian Wojnarowski was in his usual news-breaking insider role, while Bobby Marks was the front office insider.
I thought it was interesting that ESPN listed Carter as a reporter in its promotion of the draft, but she filled the same role as Redick and Bilas — analyzing draft picks — on Thursday. Unlike the other two, she wasn’t a constant reminder of how annoying the Duke basketball program has been over the years.
Across various sports, we’re so used to these productions of draft broadcasts — which are overloaded with information and extremely complicated — running so smoothly that it catches you off guard when one doesn’t.
This one did not go smoothly.
It’s not that it was a disaster. It was disjointed, and there were several decisions along the way that were bewildering at best.
This might seem odd to say about an NBA Draft broadcast, but at times — many times — there wasn’t enough about basketball. I’m still waiting for a proper explanation of why Villanova’s Cam Whitmore, who was projected to go as high as the top five, nosedived all the way to the Rockets at No. 20.
There should have been much more discussion about the Hornets’ decision to draft Alabama’s Brandon Miller over G League Ignite’s Scoot Henderson — who was long considered the second-best prospect in the draft — at
No. 2. ESPN sacrificed actual basketball conversation for a repetitive version of the human element — McNutt’s interviews with a draft pick and a family member or two, very few of whom knew to hold up the handheld microphone.
The broadcast, at times, was a UConn basketball infomercial. Huskies coach Dan Hurley had an extended stay on set, and ESPN had the gall to compare sweet-shooting No. 14 overall pick Jordan Hawkins to Hall of Famer Ray Allen. No pressure, kid.
By the time the second round came around, it was almost as if ESPN lost interest in keeping up with the picks.
When the Celtics were finally on the clock at No. 38, Walsh was selected during a commercial break. Then there was confusion at No. 39 because it had not been reported that the Celtics had traded that pick. I had to go to the Celtics beat writers on Twitter to sort it all out.
And am I the only one who thought Bilas, a reservoir of institutional knowledge on the draft who long ago mastered offering strong, clear opinions and comparisons, was marginalized? I swear that Redick, who is good at this and knows it, spoke up twice as much. Bilas deserves a much higher usage rate.
A couple of times, Andrews threw it to people who clearly weren’t ready to be on the air, suggesting that this was a production issue. It happened once with Redick, who acknowledged he didn’t know anything about a particular prospect, and it happened with Wojnarowski, who was caught off guard when asked to explain how the Marcus Smart trade came to be.
After gaining his bearings, he explained that he was texting with an NBA general manager.
Too bad they couldn’t put that GM on the air. He might have been able to tell us what was going on.