Welcome to The A Block, Awful Announcing’s daily newsletter where you’ll always find the latest sports media news, commentary, and analysis.

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🎤 QUICK START ✍️

⛳ ESPN’s Adam Schefter will try his hand at being a golf reporter this week with the PGA Tour in Connecticut.
🏰 Disney has taken another step in its legal battle against YouTube over the alleged poaching of top distribution executive Justin Connolly.
🏀 Stephen A. Smith is now locked in a feud with Ja Morant over comments about the city of Memphis.

🚨LEADING OFF 🚨

Give the people what they want

The 2025 NBA Finals have been remarkable for a number of reasons. First and most importantly, the Indiana Pacers and Oklahoma City Thunder have delivered on the floor in a series that will go at least six games. Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Jalen Williams, Tyrese Haliburton, and others have all starred at various points throughout the series.

But it’s also been one of the most heavily scrutinized championship series from a media perspective in recent memory.

A lot of this is the culmination of the frustration of basketball fans towards what they view is an overly negative product that thrives on living in the past and refuses to celebrate today’s game. Part of it is years of dissatisfaction with ESPN’s studio coverage in its final year before being rescued by Inside the NBA. And part of it is the hangover of ESPN still failing to adequately replace Jeff Van Gundy and Mark Jackson.

It all came pouring out during Game 1 when fans took to social media to say that they had enough of an NBA Finals presentation that we called “the most auraless in sports.” What was most interesting was that some of the specific criticisms were about things that hadn’t been in place for years like court decals or player intros. But then a funny thing happened.

The NBA and ESPN actually listened!

CGI court decals returned in Game 2, with a nice looking Finals script sticking around for the series after a digital Larry O’Brien trophy was largely scrapped. And for Game 5, starting lineup introductions were done for the first time for an NBA Finals game since 2013.

And to nobody’s surprise, they were awesome and immediately improved the look, feel, and aura ten-fold.

It’s one thing for a league and broadcast partner to admit they can do better and make changes from one season to the next. But rarely have we ever seen them done on the fly like this.

Yes, there is still work that can be done, but it should give hope to basketball fans (and really, sports fans everywhere) that positive change can happen that is in the best interest of the viewer at home.

Next season starts a new rights cycle for the NBA and ESPN. Amazon has greatly impressed with their NASCAR coverage and hopefully they and NBC raise the bar for basketball coverage across the board. It will be up to ESPN to keep stepping up with continued improvements as well. But at least we can have some assurance that they are indeed listening.

Next maybe we can do something about misleading start times for sports broadcasts.

📣 SOCIAL EXPERIMENT 🌟

Erin Andrews has an important PSA about bathroom selfies that should be co-signed by anyone with common sense.

Scott Van Pelt is as confused as we all are by the recent standoffish behavior from Rory McIlroy after completing the career Grand Slam by winning The Masters.

Do we still get Charles Barkley on Stanley Cup coverage for ESPN and/or TNT next year if Inside the NBA is being licensed to ESPN?

🔦 IN THE SPOTLIGHT ☀️

If it seems like today’s NBA players can’t win with the likes of Stephen A. Smith and Kendrick Perkins, it’s because they truly can’t. The ESPN analysts bashed Tyrese Haliburton for his ineffectiveness for playing through injury and struggling. But if the Pacers sat their star player, Haliburton would have likely been equally crushed by the pairing. Just ask Darius Garland.

🔢 DATA DUMP 📊

• Streaming has reached a massive milestone in surpassing linear television in popularity according to Nielsen.

• UFL leaders aren’t worried about the future of the spring football league in spite of a hefty decline in ratings this year.

• NBA Finals ratings are still at its lowest point outside the 2020 COVID bubble year through Game 4. Stanley Cup numbers are fairing even worse historically.

• Fox drew over 1 million viewers for IndyCar on Father’s Day in primetime with little other live sports competition.

• J.J. Spaun’s heroic U.S. Open triumph was a mixed bag in the ratings for NBC.

🔥THE CLOSER🔥

Artificial Unintelligence

The dawn of the Artificial Intelligence era is here and the results thus far have been fairly pedestrian if you work in the sports media field. While we are still coming to grips with what the power of AI is capable of doing, all we have seen so far is jobs being taken away and soulless, inaccurate, “reporting.”

The latest is about as dystopian of an example as you can get for today’s media landscape.

A troll account on X claimed that the Indiana Fever-New York Liberty matchup drew over 20 million viewers over the weekend, which would have seen the WNBA more than sextuple their best rating in a quarter century. In spite of being obviously false, the story spread to content farms and even as far as Yahoo Sports and the Indianapolis Star. Those articles then informed Google’s AI, who spit out the wrong rating as fact.

From troll post to online article to Google AI and straight to your computer, tablet, and phone screens! This story has everything!

First, the wild, west of an uncensored and out of control social media platform that has been completely wrecked as a useful place for news. Second, publications that didn’t bother to double check an obvious fallacy and instead chose to run with it. Third, the world’s biggest search engine that now wants you to not even clicking on any articles at all in favor of reading its AI summaries that may or may not be demonstrably wrong based on the misinformation that came before it.

The fact that we are dealing with this in the present is distressing enough. But if this is a glimpse into the wider future of the media industry… may God have mercy on us all.