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🏀 Breen’s shining moment. Lead ESPN NBA announcer Mike Breen, also the TV voice of the Knicks for nearly three decades, got to live out a dream this weekend, calling the first Knicks championship in more than 50 years on ABC. Breen told a local news station that he was most “happy” for the fans, who he said were deeply “loyal” even in the team’s bad times.

⚖️ Paramount-WBD deal approved. The U.S. Department of Justice has reportedly approved the proposed acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery by Paramount Skydance, though challenges from state attorneys general and a class action lawsuit from streaming consumers could still stand in the way of the deal.

⚽ Opening match records. Fox and Telemundo’s broadcasts of the World Cup openers for the USMNT (24.89 million) and Mexico (18.4 million) averaged record audiences. This is the first World Cup of the Big Data + Panel era at Nielsen, while both games were also in primetime for the host countries. Expect more history.

🏀 McNutt sidesteps Swift. MSG Networks radio game analyst and ESPNer Monica McNutt drew the ire of “Swifties” before Game 4 of the NBA Finals by questioning Taylor Swift’s Knicks fandom. But she clarified her remarks before Game 5, and Knicks star Jalen Brunson called on the pop star’s fans to stand down during a television interview with McNutt after the team’s title-clinching win.

As if Sunday’s UFC card at the White House didn’t have enough going on, just hours before Donald Trump made the long walk from the Oval Office to the South Lawn Octagon for Freedom 250, the president readied an agreement to end the conflict with Iran.

A sorely needed boost for the administration, the agreement also added political overtones to the long-awaited fight night, which was designed to showcase a particular American aesthetic.

Freedom 250, held on the president’s 80th birthday, was hosted amid a yearlong anniversary celebration put on by the Trump administration. The event was packaged in traditional patriotic terms but sold to its audience using modern tools. Beyond all the red, white, and blue, the military band, and the Washington, D.C., landscape, the partners chosen for the event told a deeper story. Viewers likely recognized ads from the worlds of cryptocurrency, prediction markets, and even the president’s own NFT, sponsors that themselves nod to a broader ecosystem of Trump-adjacent content online. Mark Zuckerberg was in attendance.

Paramount+ producers leaned all the way into the history on display. After Trump and White set off the festivities, commentator Daniel Cormier opened the telecast by hugging his partners and sharing his shock at getting to go to the White House. Joe Rogan asked nearly every fighter for their thoughts on fighting at the president’s residence. The stream cut often to American military brigades watching across the world. As Justin Gaethje grappled with Georgian-Spanish opponent Ilia Topuria in the third round of the main event, the crowd chanted “USA.” After Gaethje’s win, Cormier called his performance “All-American.”

Perhaps the most American moment of the night, though, came shortly before the opening bell, when a post appeared on Cormier’s X account that purported to show messages from Eric Trump, the president’s son. A screenshot of the conversation suggested Trump had asked Cormier which match was “rigged.” Quickly, the message was deleted. Cormier later posted, "Are people really this dumb?” while Trump called the post “fabricated” and blamed it on AI.

The screenshots fit right in with the logos on the mat advertising cryptocurrency, online casinos, gambling, prediction markets, and, of course, AI. Classified ads for impropriety. Under this administration, the “casino economy” has flourished. The idea that someone tied to it would seek to profit from malpractice, even at the celebratory UFC event, would hardly be surprising. Few seemed to buy the explanation from Trump or Cormier.

The card was a huge attention-grabber for UFC and the Trump administration, but it has not resonated as much as the other two major events in this busy sports month.

On a split screen for American sports fans, opposite Freedom 250, were dueling visions of the country’s culture. Throughout the weekend, New Yorkers celebrated the first Knicks title in more than 50 years, congregating throughout the city in scenes of viral jubilee that dotted For You pages everywhere. And across the U.S., fans and reps from foreign teams descended on the country for the World Cup. We saw Erling Haaland and Norway experience the Stanley Cup Final and the Algerians learn the meaning of “Rock Chalk.” A global audience found out about Buc-ees.

Many pundits have dubbed Trump the “sports president,” and this past week, Fox’s Alexi Lalas called him the “soccer president” for good measure. The administration has used sports to try to relate to the country or refocus its attention more than perhaps any other in history. For Freedom 250, it even timed geopolitical news to program the conversation.

Yet the sports stories everyone was talking about instead were organic, human. Sports are indeed shaping how we think of the country, each other, and the rest of the world during this quarter-millennium celebration, just not the way the administration clearly hoped.

A riveting NBA Finals, a fairytale New York Knicks run, and the start of the World Cup have created a ton of juicy sports media storylines: Whether the NBA can ride momentum into next season, if Victor Wembanyama will remain a “villain” or become a fan favorite, what storylines will emerge from the World Cup, and how the tournament will affect MLS.

The Ringer’s Anthony Dabbundo joined The Play-By-Play LIVE to discuss it all.

Watch the episode on YouTube or listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

“Luckily, we’re on American television. Because the W word on British TV…” - Fox Sports World Cup host Rebecca Lowe, after analyst Alexi Lalas dropped the phrase “full-kit wanker” on a pregame show over the weekend.

“We don’t have many Black head coaches in the NBA. So, I want to make that crystal clear … It was the players out there doing some dumb stuff.” - Charles Barkley, clarifying that his criticism of the Spurs after Game 4 of the NBA Finals was not directed toward head coach Mitch Johnson.

“It does feel like they think they are bigger than the World Series.” - Pat McAfee, feuding publicly with, of all places, an Omaha bar called Rocco’s that seemingly didn’t shower him in enough praise after his donation in support of West Virginia at the College World Series.

“It’s sickening that if you don’t hear what you like, you can just go to your local judge and find the answer that you want.” - ESPN’s Kirk Herbstreit, lamenting the precedent set by an injunction allowing Texas Tech’s Brendan Sorsby to supersede a ban by the NCAA.

“I’m not going to take advice from someone who switched to the other side and singing another country’s national anthem.” - Standout Fox Sports analyst Clint Dempsey, hitting back at Canada head coach Jesse Marsch, an American who suggested the USMNT lacked patriotism.

More than a billion people are expected to watch some matches during this World Cup. But the several million who will watch on iShowSpeed’s YouTube stream are among the most important viewers in the world.

At a time when so many network executives and league marketers kvetch about young fans’ lack of interest and changing viewing habits, Speed, the Ronaldo-loving, back-flipping live-streamer, has cracked the code. You’ve probably seen him in commercials for Nike or Dick’s. This past week, his “IRL” (short for in real life) streams of USA-Paraguay and Brazil-Morocco drew 4+ million viewers apiece.

As Speed circled the stadium, watched the match, and chopped it up with celebrities and soccer officials, tens of thousands of live viewers tuned in to do the same. They message each other in the chat and keep track of the score with an on-screen banner.

Speed has fans all over the world. Soccer-wise, he is an unabashed Ronaldo stan who pals around with FIFA president Gianni Infantino, who also let him live-stream during the 2022 Qatar tournament. But his most popular content is his travel streams from China, Africa, the Bahamas, and everywhere in between.

These aren’t just loyal Speed viewers who watch whatever he puts out. Maybe they are largely that, but they like soccer, too. The YouTube comment section is full of debates among viewers about the game. Someone created timestamps for all the goals. After the USA game, Speed had fun with the Fox Sports panel, which includes Thierry Henry and Zlatan Ibrahimović. Purely through his own instincts and authentic partnerships (or ones that at least feel that way), Speed has created the sort of funnel from parasocial obsession with a content creator to actual sports fan that has been debated for years.

Despite the endless alt-casts, spon-con, and collab posts, sports officials have mainly been guessing about how to deliver live sports to online communities. With Speed’s IRL streams, a good portion of the audience is clearly there for the soccer and will carry their love for the game forward when the stream ends.

The next frontier would be to see Speed stream a game with the actual world feed showing the action on the pitch, as he did for an NFL game last year in Brazil. Aside from a few quick peeks, Speed does not show on-field action during his “IRL” streams. FIFA is prickly about these highly valuable rights. Instead, fans experience the game through Speed’s reactions, or they watch his stream on a second screen. If Speed could follow the path of Brazil’s CaséTV and broadcast actual games while commenting from his desktop, the audience would likely jump considerably, and the industry would get to test one possible future for sports broadcasting.

For now, he is pumping out popular streams of top games and turning his legion of fans into soccer faithful, an achievement most traditional distributors can only dream of.

For what could be Fox Sports’ last FIFA Men’s World Cup, they’ve assembled an All-Star studio show to go all out this year.

Fox has seemingly spared no expense, bringing in a slew of talent not only from their rivals but from around the globe, including NBC Premier League host Rebecca Lowe, CBS Champions League analyst Thierry Henry, and legendary soccer star Zlatan Ibrahimović.

Alexi Lalas is here, too.

…

On Friday, the new-look studio show had its moments amid the awkwardness of getting used to one another, but it was Lalas who initially pulled focus, picking the USMNT to win the World Cup and referring to James Corden as a “full-kit wanker,” presumably unaware that’s not something you can say on national TV in some places.

However, there were other moments when keen viewers seemed to note a certain subtext in the way Henry and Ibrahimović reacted to Lalas.

Click to read more from Awful Announcing's Sean Keeley on the incredible tension among the top Fox Sports World Cup studio crew, less than one week into the tournament.