Sports

ESPN's second-round NBA Draft coverage began with tedious conversation no one asked for

It turns out that ESPN’s insistence on shoving its television personalities down its audience’s throat isn’t limited to the grating Stephen A. Smith. Even worse, in tandem, it seems the NBA is all too committed to being late to the start time of the NBA Draft, not just its games.

On Friday night, the NBA world eagerly awaited the start of the second round of the 2025 NBA Draft at the listed start time of 8:00 p.m. Eastern. And waited. And waited. And waited. It took nearly 20 minutes for the first pick of the second round (Rasheer Fleming to the Phoenix Suns) to go off the board.

How did ESPN fill the gap created by a clearly delayed (intentionally or not) start of the second round, you might ask?

It had its NBA studio panel, featuring Malika Andrews, Jay Bilas, Bobby Marks, Bob Myers, and Brian Windhorst, conduct random chit-chat about developments from the first round of the draft. Again, this happened, with everyone else twiddling their thumbs waiting for the draft to start. It was almost as if the network and the NBA decided to let a much-criticized studio panel flex its muscles to a skeptical and impatient viewing audience.

What ESPN continues to fail to understand is that people still want the live analysis and conversation to be better. They still want people who can talk about basketball with nuance and focus on basketball to be featured more. At the same time, though, they don’t want that conversation to preempt the actual basketball or hopeful basketball team-building. The analysis is not the star of the coverage, and it never has been. It’s a comforting conduit to let people tune in for what they really want to pay attention to, nothing more. It’s also not as if anyone who wants to watch the draft has another option to watch outside of ESPN, which kind of feels like something the network readily takes advantage of.

As such, ESPN’s continued response to criticism feels perfunctory. It also shows that it’s probably not entirely listening to what people are saying. But is anyone surprised there?

Until the network understands this dynamic (to be candid, it probably does, but chooses not to), it seems we’re destined to keep running on this hamster wheel of failure.

Hoops fans couldn’t believe that even the start of the NBA draft’s second round was late:

This article originally appeared on For The Win: NBA Draft start time on Friday was delayed because of ESPN

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