ESPN’s top NBA broadcast booth could be reshuffled after just one season, according to The Athletic’s Andrew Marchand.
Hall-of-Fame analyst Doris Burke is not guaranteed to be back with ESPN’s top trio of announcers, while Richard Jefferson has drawn some interest from Amazon Prime as the streaming giant gains domestic NBA media rights next season.
ESPN declined to comment to Daily Mail about the report.
Another change atop the ESPN depth chart would result in the third different grouping in as many seasons.
Until 2024, the cable giant had featured the popular trio of play-by-play announcer Mike Breen, ex-coach Jeff Van Gundy and former player and coach Mark Jackson. But while Marchand reports that ESPN didn’t order Van Gundy and Jackson’s firings, he does say it was ‘well known’ the league was upset about the former’s frequent criticism.
ESPN replaced the two with Doc Rivers and JJ Redick, who went on to take coaching positions with the Milwaukee Bucks and Los Angeles Lakers, respectively.
ESPN’s top NBA booth (from left): Richard Jefferson, Doris Burke and Mike Breen
Enter Jefferson, a popular former player, and Burke, who had been on ESPN’s No. 2 pairing with long-time play-by-play announcer Mark Jones.
The NBA’s Nielsen ratings bounced back over the course of the 2024-25 season after a slow start, but really jumped in the postseason.
NBA commissioner Adam Silver said in April that television ratings from the opening weekend of the playoffs were the best the league has seen in about a quarter century.
Speaking at the CAA World Congress of Sports presented by the Sports Business Journal on an array of topics, Silver seemed particularly pleased with the ratings from the first eight games — four on Saturday, four more on Sunday.
‘Highest-rated opening weekend in 25 years … so the numbers are fantastic,’ Silver told the CAA World Congress of Sports presented by the Sports Business Journal.
The league said the eight games over the weekend averaged 4.4 million viewers, the highest average in 25 years and a 17-percent increase over the opening weekend of last season’s playoffs.
Now the league is hoping to have similar success in the NBA Finals, where the country’s 25th- and 47th-ranked media markets will take stage when the Indiana Pacers square off with the Oklahoma City Thunder.
Until 2024, the cable giant had featured the popular trio of play-by-play announcer Mike Breen (right), ex-coach Jeff Van Gundy (center) and former player and coach Mark Jackson (left)
People are watching; they just may not be watching on television. The social media tracking site Videocites says NBA content is getting consumed at a 64 percent higher clip than last season — 32 billion views and counting so far in these playoffs. Gilgeous-Alexander is the most viewed player, Haliburton is No. 3 and playoff clips of those two have about 1.5 billion views between them to this point.
That’s billion, with a B. And speaking of that, there are 76 billion reasons the NBA won’t be bothered by whatever the ratings are over the next couple of weeks.
The new media rights deals — an 11-year, $76 billion pact between the NBA and broadcast partners Disney (ABC/ESPN), Peacock (NBC) and Amazon (Prime Video) that kicks in at the start of next season — show that clearly somebody is watching NBA games or consuming NBA content. T
he days of straight relying on Nielsen ratings seem to be long gone, with more and more people ditching cable for streaming and more and more young fans just watching everything on their phones and often in condensed versions.
