New Haven Register (Sunday) (New Haven, 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.”
Connecticut has taken many steps in the past few years to build a greener economy.
But it still needs to do much more, according to a number of lawmakers and environmental advocates. State Sen. Will Haskell, D-Westport, and state Rep. Jonathan Steinberg, DWestport, are among those pushing for more action.
The duo have introduced a bill that aims to boost the state’s nascent electric-vehicle market by allowing EV manufacturers such as Tesla to directly sell their automobiles to Connecticut customers without operating franchised dealerships.
Representing the latest version of a long-debated proposal in the state legislature, the new bill has garnered support from other legislators and many electric-vehicle owners. But it faces opposition from the state’s leading automobile-retailers associRoadmap” ation. Still, supporters and critics concur on the need to put more electric vehicles on the road.
“If we’re serious about meeting our electric-vehicle goals, meeting our climate-emissions goals and preserving our resources for the next generation, then we’ve got to put our money where our mouth is and actually make it possible for our constituents to conveniently access those very electric vehicles,” Haskell said in an interview.
Reasons to go electric
Green initiatives comprise a key part of the agenda of Gov. Ned Lamont, who announced this week the latest details of the state’s efforts to combat climate change through a regional consortium.
State officials are aiming to help put 125,000 to 150,000 electric vehicles on the road in Connecticut by 2025.
An “Electric Vehicle
published last year by the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection said Connecticut suffered from “some of the worst air quality in the country” and that the transportation sector accounted for 38 percent of the state’s greenhouse-gas emissions.
Annual sales of new light-duty vehicles in Connecticut range each year from approximately 150,000 to 180,000, but electric automobiles account
for only 2 percent of the total, according to the report.
There were nearly 2.4 million light-duty passenger cars and trucks registered in Connecticut when the DEEP report was published. But as of Jan. 1, there were only 13,800 electric vehicles registered in the state, according to the state Department of Motor Vehicles.
“The problem is
if you
look at the numbers in terms of electric-vehicle registration data from the DMV, we’re not on track to reach that (2025) goal,” Haskell said. “We’re not going to get there unless we dramatically take steps to make it easier for folks to afford an electric vehicle and then to actually buy an electric vehicle.”
Tesla supports the new bill. The Palo Alto, Calif.based company dominates the market, accounting for 70 percent of the state’s registered electric vehicles at the end of 2019, according to DEEP. The purchase price for a “standard range plus” version of Tesla’s Model 3 sedan is about $37,000, according to the Tesla website.
There is one Tesla location in the state, a leasing and service center at 881 Boston Post Road in Milford. The company maintains brick-and-mortar establishments in about 30 states. None of its locations are franchised dealerships, as the company has always eschewed that sales framework.
The firm operated a gallery in Greenwich from 2016 to 2019. Its closing reflected the company's shift to an online-only sales strategy.
Operation of the Greenwich showroom sparked a three-and-a-half-year legal battle involving Tesla, the Connecticut Automotive Retailers Association and the DMV over whether Tesla was making sales there. After a state Superior Court judge ruled against the company in December 2018, Tesla filed an appeal. It withdrew the appeal in January 2020.
Proponents and opponents
The Haskell-Steinberg bill would allow electricvehicle manufacturers to obtain new or used-car dealer licenses in Connecticut — so long as they did not have franchise agreements with any new car dealers in the state, did not produce non-electric vehicles, and committed to servicing their automobiles.
“My district has the highest electric-vehicle ownership in the entire state, but something I hear constantly from my constituents is that they don’t understand why they have to go to (the Tesla center in) Mt. Kisco, N.Y., to get their electric vehicle,” Haskell said. “It’s bad environmental policy, but it’s also just bad economic policy that we’re sending car buyers across the state border to purchase this vehicle.”
If the bill passed, Tesla would have “every intention” of opening sales locations in Connecticut, Tesla senior policy adviser Zachary Kahn said Friday during testimony in an online meeting of the state legislature’s Transportation
Committee.
In addition to Steinberg, a number of other Transportation Committee members have also expressed support for the bill.
“I am looking at components of this bill, in conjunction with others, that would aggressively move us toward a much cleaner and sustainable transportation fleet in our state,” said state Rep. Roland Lemar, D-New Haven, the Transportation Committee’s chairman.
State Rep. Devin Carney, R-Old Saybrook, said he also supported more electric vehicles — particularly through more affordable models and greater competition among manufacturers. He was more ambivalent about direct sales.
“In a time when many small businesses are struggling to keep the lights on, I think we need to find a happy medium where car dealers and electric-vehicle companies can coexist,” said Carney, a ranking member of the Transportation Committee.
In the past few years, the state legislature has considered other bills to allow electric-vehicle manufacturers to sell directly, but all of those proposals have foundered.
“Unlike similar bills that have been introduced in the past, this one applies to any manufacturer of exclusively electric vehicles that does not have an established dealer network,” said EV Club of Connecticut President Barry Kresch, whose group wrote the original version of the new bill. “Earlier versions were more narrowly crafted, and while they did not include the word ‘Tesla’ in them, the requirements meant they could only apply to Tesla.”
But there is also significant opposition. Legislation seeking to allow direct vehicle sales “hurts consumers and seeks to benefit only certain companies,” said Connecticut Automotive Retailers Association President Sarah Fryxell. CARA represents Connecticut’s 270 newvehicle dealerships.
At the same time, CARA officials reiterated their support for the Connecticut Franchise Act and franchise agreements, which govern dealerships’ new-vehicle sales.
“The law ensures a fair and reasonable business relationship between locally owned auto dealers and the multinational automobile manufacturers,” Fryxell said. “What’s more, the Franchise Act and franchise agreements protect Connecticut consumers by providing them with fair and encompassing warranties, guaranteeing state and federal safety laws are followed, providing the enforcement of the lemon and fair lending laws and establishing guidelines for safety recalls.”
Haskell, Steinberg, and Tesla officials responded that the new bill would maintain consumer-protection laws.
“We want to come in and set up a dealership, have a sales team, have a service team — all like you would see at a traditional dealership,” Kahn said. “We want to meet all the rules and regulations that oversee dealerships in Connecticut. Tesla has never had a franchisee relationship with anyone around the world, so there’s no concern about us unfairly competing with our franchisees because we simply don’t have them.”
During the Transportation Committee hearing, representatives of electricvehicle makers Lucid Motors and Rivian also spoke in support of the bill.
The world’s largest automobile manufacturers are also setting increasingly ambitious EV goals. Ford pledged this past week to convert all of its passenger vehicles in Europe to electric power by 2030, while Jaguar announced a plan to go fully electric by 2025. General Motors committed last month to making electric the vast majority of its vehicles by 2035.
“There are a number of other new manufacturers — as innovative as Tesla, perhaps — who are also interested in direct sales to really push the envelope on the kind of choice that we offer to people here in Connecticut,” Steinberg said in the hearing.
Enthusiasm for electric vehicles
In a recently released report from the American Council for an EnergyEfficient Economy, Connecticut ranked 13th among the states in encouraging consumers to buy electric vehicles.
Among key programs, the Connecticut Hydrogen and Electric Automobile Purchase Rebate (CHEAPR) provides incentives toward purchases or leases of eligible electric vehicles.
“We've made some good progress with the CHEAPR program, but it’s simply insufficient and consistently underfunded,” Steinberg said. “If we're really going to move the needle, we need to enable working-class people to get EVs, probably previously owned and certainly subsidized. And we have a long way to go, as most states, to develop an effective charging network and convert state fleets.”
Despite CARA’s opposition to direct sales, Fryxell said that the organization and new car dealerships have “proudly partnered” with the CHEAPR program and that the amount of electric vehicles sold in the state is “testament to the locally owned dealerships’ commitment to the needs of our customers and to Connecticut’s cleanair efforts.”
Haskell said he welcomed dealerships’ support of electric vehicles, citing the need for broad backing to achieve the state’s green objectives.
“I can’t personally afford an electric vehicle yet,” he said. “But as the youngest member of the General Assembly (Haskell was born in 1996), I think a lot about two things: how to modernize our state’s statutes — some of which are drastically outdated — and also how can we protect our planet so the next generation has clean air and clean water to enjoy here in Connecticut. That’s why this bill is so important to me.”