Zach Lowe has a simple test for a great League Pass broadcast. It’s not just the announcer. It’s the announcer, the team, and the way those two things feed each other.
By that measure, he and Bill Simmons agreed this season that nobody came close to Charlotte.
Eric Collins has been the voice of Hornets basketball since 2015. He has called games through every phase of this franchise’s long rebuild, through years when there was genuinely nothing to get excited about, through the arrival of LaMelo Ball in 2020 and the slow, injury-interrupted process of figuring out what this team could actually become.
When Ball arrived, Collins said pretty plainly that calling his games would define his career. This season, with Ball healthy and Charlotte chasing a playoff berth for the first time since 2016, that investment has finally found the stage it deserved. The Hornets run and shoot and throw down alley-oops every night, and Collins sounds like a man who has been waiting a decade for a team this fun to call. That’s what Lowe was getting at.
“Look, we all know who the sort of pet broadcast teams are,” Lowe said. “We all love the New York broadcast, the Brooklyn broadcast. I love the Toronto broadcast. But the whole experience of Eric Collins just losing his mind 10 times a game for a team that… You watch the Wizards broadcast, and they’ll lose their mind over Bob Carrington making a mid-range jump shot… Eric Collins is going crazy for legitimate basketball reasons.”
“He really cares,” Simmons added, “and like somebody will make a shot against them, it’d be two minutes left, they’re down one. And then some f*ck up, and somebody will hit a three against them, and he’ll just say some crazy sentence like, ‘Oh, isn’t that a chainsaw on the tibia?’ He just has this endless thing of crazy comments. The Hornets are hanging on like a hat on a screen door. He’s a ten out of ten.”
The calls are what most people know Collins for, and there are plenty of them. The clips travel because they’re funny and a little unhinged, and Collins apparently has a bottomless supply of them. But that’s not what Lowe was actually getting at. The thing he was praising is something much harder to find. Collins has never once taken that same energy and weaponized it. He doesn’t go after players on the other team. He doesn’t manufacture a villain to make Charlotte look better by comparison. When the Hornets blow a fourth-quarter lead, he sounds like a man who can’t believe what he just watched, not one who is looking around for someone or something to blame it on.
Most local broadcasters who get that loud and that invested eventually tip into something uglier. Not Collins.
“By the way, note for announcers, a lot of what you’re saying is he’s enthusiastic without being a gratuitous homer,” Lowe said, “and part of that is, unlike some other homers, never hostile to the other team or the opposing players for no reason. Never going out of your way to criticize, sometimes unjustly, somebody on the other team.”
“He is like everything you would ever want from your local play-by-play guy,” Simmons added. “Drew Carter is like this with the Celtics, too. They’re overqualified to be doing the local games, like they’re really national guys.”
The national recognition has been a long time coming. Collins has been doing this in Charlotte since 2015, building a style so distinctive that his calls regularly go viral outside of any basketball context, finding audiences who have never watched a Hornets game in their lives. Prime Video noticed and hired him last summer for its inaugural NBA package. Fox gave him his NFL debut in October, calling Dolphins-Panthers at the stadium he could have walked to from his front door, and a football audience had the same reaction basketball fans — as well as Steph Curry and LeBron James — have been having for years.
Good on you, Eric Collins. And Dell Curry, too.
About Sam Neumann
Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.