I’ve been a basketball fan for as long as I can remember, and some of my favorite memories from the sport come from the incredible series between the Celtics and Lakers in the late 2000s.
I would wake up early just to catch SportsCenter before school, and I couldn’t wait to get home for SportsNation afterward. My evenings usually meant more ESPN while waiting for the game that night. After it ended, I’d start polishing my talking points for the inevitable debates at school the next day.
I still remember going back and forth with friends about how Kobe didn’t know how to pass. To us at the time, he was an inefficient, foul-baiting ball hog.PauGasolandAndrew Bynum were dirty players.
I also remember ESPN not sounding like the lunch table.
Sure,Kobewascriticized for shot selection and ball dominance, but national broadcasts treated him like the great player he was first, not as a gimmick or meme. It would’ve felt outlandish for a color commentator to refer to him as a “foul merchant,” like Doris Burke once did Shai Gilgeous-Alexander.
It would’ve felt equally ridiculous to make a similar comment about Wade, Curry, Jordan, LeBron, Dirk or almost any other established star. Not because those players didn’t use tactics to create advantages, but because the media understood those tactics were part of what made them great, not the entirety of who they were.
That same respect has not been applied to Gilgeous- Alexander and the Oklahoma City Thunder, despite similar dominance and a roster built the way fans and media have spent years saying teams should be built.
WiththeWesternConference finals matchup against the Spurs being framed as one of the most anticipated of all time, how did the media handle that colossal moment?
By making the series feel less like a heavyweight battle between the two biggest rising stars in the sport, and more like a weeklong argument between the sixth-grade versions of myself and friends from earlier in the column.
ThroughGame4,instead of breaking down any adjustments the teams had made to that point, national coverage mainly centered on Gilgeous-Alexander’s “foul baiting.” The Spurs had a plus-17 free-throw advantage at that point in the series and ended the series with a plus-21 advantage.
After Game 5, instead of discussing one of the most impressive bounce-back wins in playoff history without two of Oklahoma City’s five best players, the conversation was about Wembanyama skipping media, Mason Plumlee’s cheap shot on Jared Mc-Cain and Gilgeous-Alexander’s flopping. Yahoo’s Tom Haberstroh tracking Gilgeous-Alexander’s “fall percentage” and Jay Williams dedicating an ESPN segment to it called “Life Alert with SGA” are a small sample of the lazy X narratives that bled into mainstream coverage during the series.
In contrast, media members covering the NFL understand how to properly cover and frame their product. Patrick Mahomes gets calls, Josh Allen sells contact and star players benefit from rules designed to protect them. But when one of those calls decides the outcome of a game, do those media members immediately regurgitate the most reactionary takes from X the next morning? They do not.
Fans rely on the media to parse through narratives and give us honest analysis. While it might be better for a media personality’s brand to go viral by plagiarizing the previous night’s mostviral social media post, it does nothing for the sport. It makes coverage feel cheap and unserious, and it is a disservice to fans who tune in to learn about the sport they love.