Cris Collinsworth was in his usual slot alongside Mike Tirico during Sunday night’s Falcons-49ers game, so unless AI has figured out how to perfectly mimic the NFL analyst’s inimitable delivery, it’s safe to assume that the higher-ups at NBC didn’t have him whacked.
The Sunday Night Football mainstay joked that heavy-handed reprisals could be in the works last week, when he gave Kay Adams a bit of a sneak preview as to what viewers might expect to hear from Michael Jordan later Tuesday night when the network tips off its first NBA broadcast in 23 years. During his Thursday morning appearance on FanDuel TV’s Up & Adams, Collinsworth prefaced his remarks on his Airness’ role within the NBC Sports family with a jocular, “Man, I’m gonna get shot for some of this.”
Adams didn’t exactly give the former Bengal the Mike Wallace treatment, but he spilled anyway. Well, sort of.
“I’m sure it’s all a big surprise, but … it will be a deep dive into the brain of Michael Jordan. Is that enough of a tease without giving away anything?” Collinsworth said when asked to make with the goods on MJ. Since NBC announced Jordan’s hire during its May upfront presentation, everyone involved has adhered to the omertà principle, and while nobody seriously expects the GOAT will don a rental blazer or, say, fly out to Milwaukee on a Tuesday night, Collinsworth’s remarks gave us our first real hint at what to expect.
Collinsworth went on to suggest that Jordan’s collaboration with NBC would allow him to hold court from within the friendly confines of home—perhaps while seated in the same chair from whence arose the “And I Took That Personally” meme. (A phrase he never actually uttered in The Last Dance, but try telling that to the internet.) Collinsworth dangled the prospect of a meditative Jordan, who’ll dish up all “the things that you would really want to know from [him], if you got a chance to sit down and just have a conversation with [him], no cameras, just a, you know, couple glasses of wine.”
What you’re not going to get is anyone peppering Jordan about trivial matters—or, as Collinsworth framed it, he won’t be fielding anything along the lines of, “Who do you think the best player in the NBA is?”—although it’s understandable if more than a few NBC viewers are hoping that Jordan’s assessment of today’s rosters is as unflinching as the judgments he’s made on his old rivals.
In Jordan’s view, any perceived slight is an invitation to hurl thunderbolts from his aerie atop Roundball Mount Olympus, a characteristic that, if nothing else, makes for great TV. As was captured in that pandemic-year doc, Jordan is a basketball Borgia, an adherent of the art of the vendetta, and the ruthlessness with which he settles scores is of the salting-the-earth variety. Unless he’s mellowed considerably since The Last Dance got us through that sports-free stretch of 2020—a decidedly unlikely turn of events—Jordan’s likely going to toss a few barbs every now and again toward the pretenders to his throne. (Strap in, LeBron.)
Just a few hours after Collinsworth dropped a few hints on Adams’ show, NBC Sports executive producer Sam Flood kept mum on what Jordan might have up his 34 ¼” sleeve, telling a reporter on a conference call to, “stay tuned Tuesday night.” Upon which NBA on NBC analyst Reggie Miller cracked, “Way to leave them hanging there, Sam Flood!”
It goes without saying that Jordan is emblematic of the NBA’s glorious run in the 1990s, and a heady nostalgia has informed much of NBC’s approach to its renewed partnership with the league. Not for nothing did the sports division fork over a bundle for the rights to license the Roundball Rock theme—which for years effectively served as the soundtrack to Jordan crushing the dreams of his opponents—from its shooting guard-size composer, John Tesh. (When negotiations over Tesh’s golden ticket first began last year, an exec joked to Sportico that the two parties weren’t all that far apart, as only a terminal zero separated the asking price from what NBC was willing to pay.)
Miller went on to thread the needle on the nostalgia angle, allowing that the NBC crew’s first order of business “is to merge the old with the new.” The trick, as Miller would have it, will be to “continue to innovate as we go forward without alienating the people who were around in the ‘90s who are used to … what NBC brought to the game.”
One aspect of NBC’s coverage that will be hard to miss is a premium on storytelling, and while that element first flourished when Dick Ebersol was named president of the sports unit in 1989, narrative remains a key component of the 30 Rock philosophy. (In that sense, the storytelling angle is anything but a pure nostalgia play.) As a guy who watched plenty of NBC when he wasn’t guarding Jordan, Miller’s all for it. “You can talk about all the X’s and O’s you want, but they did very human-type elements in their production, and I think we’re going to bring that back, and I’m excited to be a part of it,” Miller said.
Flood was more expansive when asked about the limitations of going full-retro. (Younger fans won’t remember this, but there was a time when the first thing someone said upon entering a room with a TV that was airing an NBA or NFL or MLB or NHL game was, “What’s the score?”) “We’re obviously going to lean into the past, but we’re going to build forward and grow the game and grow with the game,” he said. “If we went all the way back and did our old-school telecast, you wouldn’t see the scoreboard in full-time. You wouldn’t see a lot of things that are common in sports now. There was no permanent clock!”
That said, “between Tesh and [the AI-generated voice of] Jim Fagan and the laser Peacock and some other elements, you will feel that connection,” Flood said. “And those who watched the NBA on NBC during those glory years, from ’90 to 2012, they’ll feel that familiar beat and that familiar look that made the NBA on NBC so special.”
Also stoking the nostalgia jones is the NBA’s warm embrace of good ol’ over-the-air television, a platform which back in the late Jordan era was believed to be on its last legs. (We also had no idea that the internet was going to devolve into an egg-sucking hellscape, so that’s no dig on Peak Cable prognosticators.) Play-by-play guy extraordinaire Tirico, a throwback of sorts to the Swiss Army knife days when lead mics covered every sport in the network portfolio, said the addition of all those Tuesday night games (and Sundays, once the NFL packs it in for the season) should be a real boon for the NBA and its followers.
“The fact that the NBA is going to be on broadcast network TV, still the broadest reach of anything in media … is really cool,” Tirico said. “That is so big for just exposing the NBA to more folks and getting a better, deeper pool of fans going towards the playoffs, where it really builds up.”
Given the boost the networks have enjoyed since Nielsen upgraded its ratings methodology last month, NBC’s first batch of NBA deliveries should be a treat for advertisers. And while TV usage is nowhere near as rampant as it was in the final days of NBC’s first partnership with the league, media buyers expect that the new-look NBA package will out-deliver the 3.7 million viewers the network averaged during its final season of “Roundball Rock”-primed hoops. Tipping things off at 7:30 p.m. ET, the Rockets-Thunder opener should breeze past the 5 million mark, while even in the absence of LeBron James, Lakers-Warriors should still eclipse the 2002 NBA numbers in the 10 p.m. ET slot.
One area that NBC can’t hope to match is the relative thrift with which it negotiated its last NBA contract. All the nostalgia in the world won’t bring NBC back to the magical year that was 1989, when it succeeded CBS as the league’s primary TV booster with a four-year, $600 million bid. (CBS, which the year before had telegraphed its intentions by way of a $1.1 billion deal with MLB, had paid just $176 million for its own four-year NBA pact, which ran from ’86 through ’90.)
Even when you account for inflation, NBC’s first NBA contract would have cost it a mere $1.57 billion, give or take, which works out to a fraction of the $27.5 billion the network will shell out over the course of its new 11-year pact. For all the enthusiasm flying around Rockefeller Center these days, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the NBA was paying NBC to carry its games, and not the other way around.
In the meantime, the world awaits Michael Jordan’s first big TV moment since his mesmerizing turn in The Last Dance. Buckle up, LeBron: MJ just might have a few things he’d like to get off his chest. Try not to take it personally.
