We’re just over two weeks into the NBA season, and fewer people are more engaged and have the pulse of the league more than David Aldridge. He’s covered the NBA for more than 25 years, joining Turner Sports in 2004, and was this year’s recipient of the Basketball Hall of Fame’s Curt Gowdy Media Award, and was inducted there in September.
In addition to his weekly Morning Tip column, Aldridge is a TNT sideline reporter who will be working Thursday night’s Chicago-Miami game, which will be Dwyane Wade’s return to South Florida. On Election Day, of all days, Aldridge took time out to discuss his column, his career and how he deals with Gregg Popovich on the air.
Note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
The latest
[Laughs] John Doleva [the president and CEO of the HOF] called. I think I was in Toronto for All-Star, so this was in February. He informed me, and I was stunned and surprised and felt an incredibly different amount of emotion. It was not something I was expecting.
I know a lot of the people that have won the Goudy Award, especially on the print side, and it’s people that I hold in the highest regard and respect that have covered this league for a long time, and in many cases longer than I have. To be included with the likes of Bob Ryan and Jackie MacMullan and Sam Smith and David DuPree and Mark Heisler. It was a very humbling award and honor, obviously the biggest one of my career. So I felt very moved that the Hall considered my work to be of that kind of caliber and quality.
Every sport seems to have this massive, expansive weekly column. For the NFL, it’s Peter King’s Monday Morning Quarterback. For the NHL, it’s Elliotte Friedman’s 30 Thoughts. And for the NBA, it seems to be your Monday Morning Tip, which is divided now into several different sections rather than one long opus. Could you just take our readers through what goes into writing and producing the column every week?
I said this with the absolute first column that I wrote, that this is a blatant rip-off of Peter King’s Monday Morning Quarterback column [laughs]. So that’s exactly where I got it from, because I read Peter’s column every week and I wanted to have a column like that for the NBA.
There would be come breaking news in it, if you’re fortunate enough. Because with the lead time, you can plan on that thing happening. But you wanted some breaking news in it, and it’s more of a look at the entire league, as much of the league as you could include in one week. I try to do three or four different stories. I try to do a fairly deep dive on at least one or two of them. I like the Q&A format.
When I first started the column, I liked doing the 15th guy, the guy that didn’t play, because I felt like even the guy who doesn’t play on an NBA team is one of the best basketball players in the world and has a great story. And many of them did. But as time went on, I felt like it was silly for me not to include the star players that you do wind up getting access to and talking to.
I try to make it as comprehensive as possible so that people, when it drops on Monday morning, they can take as long as they want. They can take an hour or two and try to read the whole thing, or they can read it in different chunks now. So I want it to be the NBA column everybody reads every week. That’s the goal anyways. I don’t want game stories. I want it to be about the league and what’s going on with the teams, players and coaches and some of the behind-the-scenes stuff that people may not know or understand, or some of the historical stuff that younger readers may not know. So you try to have a little something in there for everybody.
I’m sure this varies by the week, but how long on average does it take to finish?
It’s seven days. I mean, it’s every day. I already have stuff for next week’s column that I got last night. It’s a seven-day process. The weekends are more intense because you’re trying to finish everything up and the stats have to be as up to date as possible so you have to wait for Sunday night to do a lot of the stats, and to do the rankings because a lot of teams play on Sunday, especially once the ABC games start on Saturday night and Sunday.
It’s several hours every day, either reporting or transcribing or calling or waiting for people to call you back, or being at a game and interviewing people there. Every week is different. This past week for some reason, everything just kind of fell into place and it was relatively easy to put together and I was able to send it in, I think, before midnight Sunday night. Most weeks it’s three or four in the morning before I’m done, and there’s been more than one or two occasions when there hasn’t been any sleep.
The Lakers, I remember them not hiring Phil Jackson [in 2012] and hiring Mike D’Antoni late on a Sunday night, when everybody thought they were hiring Phil Jackson, and I had to rip everything up and start over again. That’s what happens with a fluid type of column.
And on top of all that with The Morning Tip, you’re doing sideline reporting for the NBA on TNT. What’s your travel schedule and your itinerary like as you prepare for those telecasts?
I’ve been doing sideline since I started with TNT in 2004. Every week you go the day before, usually, so for a Thursday game— we have the Miami game this week— I go on Wednesday to try to get to the home team’s practice if they’re practicing. If they’re not, hopefully get in contact with the road team and talk to a couple of assistant coaches if you can or players, if you have relationships with them, just to see how their team is going that particular week. And then Thursday morning are kind of formal sit-down interviews usually at shootaround. Well, we have a meeting first in the morning, and then I go to shootaround and depending on the schedule, you can get one person— usually it’s the road team— we’ll do shootaround and they’ll make a player available. And then you usually get somebody from the home team when they come in for the game, because they tend to come in a little bit earlier home games, so we might have a little bit more time to talk.
That’s just the travel process. All week, you’re calling people on both teams and talking to people about how teams are playing, and you watch games on TV. Watch some tape on some more recent games to see if there’s any trends going on. And then it’s a matter of taking all that information and giving three, four items on each team that you could use, potentially, in a broadcast. And then obviously you’re always looking out for injuries and things like that and things that happen during the game that you need to report on.
The geometry of basketball is different from every other sport. You know with football, you have those 45 seconds between plays. With baseball, there’s no limit between plays and you could tell a story. You can’t do that in basketball because when the defensive possession ends, the offensive position begins. You just don’t have the time to tell stories, so you don’t wind up getting as much on as you’d like. But that’s just the nature of the beast, so you overprepare. All the good sideline reporters I know, no matter what the sport is, they tend to overprepare and they have much more than they ever get on the air.
As someone who does these national TNT games, you have these beginning of quarter interviews with coaches. The one everyone seems to dread is Gregg Popovich. Do you have any embarrassing or awkward Pop stories you’d like to share?
I mean, honestly no.
I say this every time someone interviews me and they inevitably want to ask me about the Pop interviews. The problem is that most people who see Gregg Popovich only see those 45 to 60 seconds of that interview every week. They don’t see him in practice, they don’t see him before the games, they don’t see him in other situations where he could not be more gregarious and more interesting and more interested and willing to engage you in things. He’s a fascinating guy in a lot of ways.
So, no. I know people who always go back to that happy interview I did with him where he said “you’re not happy, you’re never happy.” But that was fine. I’ve always enjoyed the back and forth with Pop. I know it’s not personal. I know that he just doesn’t like to do this during games, so he has the same reaction with [Craig] Sager, the same reaction with Doris Burke, the same reaction with everyone else that does a sideline interview. I don’t take it personally when he’s usually short. You just go on to the next question. What can you do? You just try to ask as intelligent a question as you could think of and hope he’s in a good mood.
Everyone’s talking about the Cavs and the Warriors, among a few other things. What do you think the most underreported story or trend is in the league right now?
Hmm. Well that’s a good question. Probably Houston.
I don’t think James Harden is getting a lot of attention, considering the numbers he’s putting up so far, which are phenomenal. He has a chance to lead the league in scoring and assists, and I don’t think that’s been done since Tiny Archibald [in 1972-1973]. So that’s a pretty big deal. It’s a big story.
I’m not criticizing anyone. The Golden State story is a huge story, and the ramifications of it on and off the court are huge stories in the league. I get that people are maybe paying a lot of attention to that, including casual fans.
So I would say Houston. And Harden, not that he’s totally blameless, but I think he kind of gets blamed sometimes for some things that aren’t his fault. What he’s doing so far— it’s early— two weeks into the season, but he’s putting up some monster numbers.
I would also say that the East has not been as good as I had hoped it would be top to bottom. Cleveland’s very good, obviously the best team in the conference, and I think Toronto’s probably second best right now. But I thought one of those teams, whether Chicago or New York or Washington, would make a move and be a little bit better, but they haven’t been as good as I thought one or two of them might be. The kind of weakness in the East is a little surprising to me. I thought Milwaukee or Orlando, and certainly Indiana, was going to be strong out of the gate.
You mentioned Sager before. What would be the biggest lesson you’ve learned from him over the years?
Well look. I always say this to people all the time. If you make it just about what he’s wearing, you’re not getting it. Because while he does wear great clothes that he can pull off and the rest of us can’t, what I’ve always said about Craig is that he asks the right questions.
In those situations where it’s loud and your time is short and you only have a couple of questions to ask somebody, whether it’s after a game or in the locker room or a coach, he asks the right questions. And that’s the mark of a great journalist in that situation. And he does it time and time again. I’m amazed by his ability to understand what the most important thing is in a given game and get to that thing, whatever it is. And that’s a tribute to his knowledge, his intelligence, his work ethic. All of those things.
He’s a remarkable guy in so many ways. And what you see with these various tributes that teams are doing around the league and have been doing for the last year-plus and the respect people have for Craig, and the respect that everybody in the league has for him as one of the people that not only promotes the league, but is a great journalist in terms of covering the league.
Comments are closed.