This month, for the first time since 2002, NBC will broadcast the NBA.
It’s been a long time coming for the broadcast network, which signed an 11-year deal with the league last year for a reported $2.5 billion per season. As part of that multibillion dollar commitment, NBC will get to air an NBA conference final every other year, beginning with the 2026 Western Conference Finals.
But even with the network announcing its full team of broadcasters for the upcoming season, NBC has yet to provide clarity on who exactly will call its biggest games. We know that the network’s do-it-all talent Mike Tirico will lead play-by-play for the NBC’s NBA package, but who will sit next to him for those high-leverage games?
We know that the two most prominent and experienced game analysts NBC has hired are Reggie Miller, who served as TNT’s lead NBA analyst alongside Kevin Harlan while that network aired the league, and Jamal Crawford, another former TNT analyst who was named one of AA’s rising stars in 2024, but left TNT later that year to explore other roles, landing with NBC last December.
On a recent edition of the Sports Media Watch Podcast, NBC Sports president Rick Cordella hinted that the network’s lead booth might feature both Miller and Crawford for the Western Conference Finals in May.
“We don’t really have a lead crew,” Cordella began. “Jamal and Reggie are equals, and so you’ll see us going two-man crews and three-man crews at different times. And then we’ll see how the season goes. And if it works, and the chemistry works, we’ll make adjustments one way or the other, but there’s no one that’s above the other right now. And we don’t anticipate that too, I mean, I think you head into the playoffs, and the Western Conference Finals that we have this year, you’re going to see potentially a three-man booth.”
Miller and Crawford worked in a three-man booth at times during their tenures at TNT Sports, with Harlan as play-by-play. So the duo certainly has chemistry to build off of.
For better or worse, three-person booths have become the norm during the most important basketball games of the year. ESPN uses a three-person booth during the NBA Finals. CBS and TNT Sports deploy a three-person booth during the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament Final Four and Championship Game. TNT used a three-man booth for last year’s Eastern Conference Finals, with Harlan and Miller calling the series alongside Stan Van Gundy.
The only two-person booth currently calling championship-level basketball is ESPN’s Ryan Ruocco and Rebecca Lobo, who call both the WNBA Finals and the NCAA Women’s Basketball Tournament Final Four and Championship Game.
To be certain, Cordella did not firmly commit to deploying a three-man booth come this postseason. Perhaps NBC will see either Miller or Crawford alone emerge as a preferable option. But it seems that absent a substantial discrepancy in quality between the three-man team and either of the two-man booths, NBC is operating under the assumption that both Miller and Crawford will be calling its most important games alongside Tirico.
About Drew Lerner
Drew Lerner is a staff writer for Awful Announcing and an aspiring cable subscriber. He previously covered sports media for Sports Media Watch. Future beat writer for the Oasis reunion tour.