This originally appeared in Tuesday morning’s edition of The A Block, Awful Announcing’s daily newsletter with the latest sports media news, commentary, and analysis. Sign up here and be the first to know everything going on in the sports media world.
Watching Mike Breen, Tim Legler, and Richard Jefferson call Saturday’s Lakers-Warriors game on ESPN, the thing that stands out most isn’t any individual moment but rather the sense that you’re watching a booth still in the process of figuring out what it wants to be.
Breen dominated the broadcast in the way that he has always dominated broadcasts, peppering in statistics and contextual detail at a rate that occasionally made the whole thing feel like a radio call, the kind where the announcer is describing what he sees because he can’t trust that you can see it yourself. That instinct isn’t entirely wrong for a play-by-play voice, but it has a cost, and the cost here is that Legler and Jefferson spent significant stretches of the first half waiting for an opening that Breen wasn’t quite leaving for them.
There’s a version of a point guard who makes everyone around him better by knowing when not to have the ball, and there’s a version who controls the game so thoroughly that his teammates stop moving without him.
Breen, at least on Saturday, was closer to the latter.
@awful_announcing Is Mike Breen still the best #nba play by play voice? #espn #sportsmedia ♬ original sound – Awful Announcing
What makes that worth paying attention to is that Legler is genuinely one of the sharper analysts working in basketball right now, someone whose value to this broadcast goes well beyond what Saturday’s blowout allowed you to see. He thinks like a coach in the specific rather than the generic sense — not just offering the reflexive “they need to get stops” observations that fill dead air on most broadcasts, but pulling from real conversations with people like Steve Kerr and working that context into the live call in a way that actually illuminates what you’re watching.
He’s unafraid to have a genuine opinion, willing to be critical of players and officials in a way that three-man booths often smooth away in the interest of keeping things comfortable, and he has a wit about him that comes through without ever feeling like he’s performing. The floor of this broadcast is higher because he’s in it, and the ceiling is genuinely interesting if Breen develops the kind of trust with him that made the Jeff Van Gundy-Mark Jackson partnership work so well for so long. That trust isn’t quite there yet, but it’s the thing most worth watching for as the season gets closer to the playoffs.
Jefferson is a more complicated conversation, and the complication isn’t about his basketball intelligence, which is real. It’s about fit. In a studio setting or on a podcast, Jefferson has the format that suits him — the time to develop a thought, to let his personality and his player’s perspective come together in a way that makes people want to listen. Some of his best television moments have come in exactly those environments, and they’re genuinely good.
But in a three-man booth alongside Breen’s encyclopedic play-by-play and Legler’s analytical specificity, the space for Jefferson to do what he does best doesn’t really exist, and what you end up with is a talented person whose gifts aren’t particularly well-matched to the constraints of the job. That’s not a condemnation — plenty of excellent television personalities are better in one format than another, and there’s no shame in being built for the studio rather than the booth. The question is whether ESPN, having committed to this configuration and brought Jefferson back when there was outside interest in him, is willing to be honest with itself about what it actually has.
The good news is that this is a booth with real upside, and a January blowout with no Steph Curry is about the least flattering possible environment to evaluate it. A playoff series in May, with games that matter and stories worth telling, is where the chemistry either arrives or it doesn’t, and there’s enough here — in Legler’s mind, in Breen’s preparation, in the genuine warmth between the three of them — to think it might. But the window for this group to become something special is not unlimited, and the sooner Breen trusts his partners enough to let the game breathe, the better the odds that it does.
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