Thursday night’s NBA Draft left Rich Shertenlieb scratching his head. He was not shy on Friday morning telling his Toucher & Rich colleagues what he thought of the job ESPN did.
“I started looking at the broadcast going, ‘This is chaos,’” he said on 98.5 The Sports Hub. “This might be, and I’m not trying to speak in hyperbole here. That might be the worst draft coverage that I’ve ever seen.”
Fred Toucher agreed. He thought the interviews with prospects were largely valueless.
Shertenlieb’s chief complaint was pretty simple. It stands to reason that people tuning into the NBA Draft want to know what teams are picking which players. He said that one of ESPN’s greatest failures was making that hard to determine.
“I’d be sitting up there watching it, and you know how almost every other draft coverage it has at the bottom right corner of the screen ‘Trailblazers on the clock’ and it’ll have like a countdown and all say like who they picked? There were times where they were interviewing people who had been drafted an hour beforehand while like two picks had gone by. If you’re sitting there as a Celtics fan and you’re waiting for them before, of course, they traded it a million times and you’re waiting for number 25, I had to go online and figure out where they were, like what they had already picked.”
While Shertenlieb had many complaints about ESPN’s presentation, he did have some sympathy for one member of the broadcast crew. He thought the network put Malika Andrews in a position to be the target of Twitter’s ire.
“They gave her the crap job in that if any of these guys had any kind of criminal background, like the second they were drafted they said, ‘here’s everything that they’ve done awful.’ They just read it and just basically, ‘let’s get this out of the way so we don’t get any criticism for propping these guys up.’ But it was Malika Andrew’s job to do that whenever any of these guys had any kind of rap.”
Dave Roberts, ESPN’s Head of NBA and Studio Production, and Mike Shiffman, the network’s Senior VP of Production, talked about that aspect of the presentation on a conference call earlier this week. When asked about Brandon Miller, who went number two overall to the Charlotte Hornets, they said that Miller’s role in a murder investigation in Tuscaloosa, AL would be mentioned but would not be the entirety of how he was covered.
