Why Brian Scalabrine and NBC Sports Boston didn’t call the Celtics’ Christmas Day game from Toronto
According to an NBC Sports Boston spokesperson, the decision was a combination of late notice and logistics.
Brian Scalabrine keeps himself busy, what with his NBC Sports Boston duties as a Celtics analyst, hosting his daily “Scal and Pals’’ podcast on Radio.com, and assorted other professional and personal duties. He’s even currently promoting a pasta sauce — Scal’s Big Red Sauce. What else would it be called?
But what he hasn’t figured out how to do is be two places at once. It just seemed that he had during and after NBC Sports’s Christmas Day broadcast of the Celtics’ victory over the Raptors in Toronto.
During the game, Scalabrine served as the color analyst on the broadcast alongside Mike Gorman, just as he has on road games since returning to NBC Sports Boston in 2014-15. To viewers who tuned in late or missed an acknowledgment of what was going on, it certainly seemed like Scalabrine and Gorman were coming to you live from Scotiabank Arena, the home of the Raptors.
But they were not, which became clear, if it wasn’t already, during the postgame show. Kyle Draper and Chris Forsberg were dissecting the Celtics’ impressive 108-102 victory when they were joined by another analyst on set: Scalabrine. Who seemed to be in another country just a few minutes before.
That led to some confusion from Celtics fans on Twitter and a smattering of Christmas Day correspondence in your friendly neighborhood media columnist’s e-mail inbox. Every question was a variation of, “Wait … Mike and Scal weren’t actually in Toronto?’’
Turns out that was true. Gorman and Scalabrine called the game from a feed in the NBC Sports Boston studio. According to an NBC Sports Boston spokesperson, the decision was a combination of late notice and logistics.
The Celtics-Raptors game was part of ESPN and ABC’s Christmas Day package, a tradition in its 18th season. NBC Sports Boston did not find out it the NBA would peel away the networks’ national exclusivity on the broadcasts – thereby allowing NBC Sports Boston, the regional cable broadcast home of the Celtics, also to carry the game – until a couple of weeks ago.
The spokesperson said that NBC Sports Boston could not fully staff the game because of the timeline and the relatively short notice on finding out it could indeed carry the game. So the network decided sideline reporter Abby Chin and reporter A. Sherrod Blakely would make the trip, while Gorman and Scalabrine would remain local to call the action off a monitor in the network’s Burlington studios.
(Interestingly, Gorman has called a sporting event off a monitor in another country before: He called handball for NBC during the 2012 Olympics in London. But he wasn’t in London, but rather a studio watching a feed at the network’s sports headquarters in Stamford, Conn.)
The spokesperson didn’t provide specifics on how much advance notice would have been required to send the full staff, including Gorman and Scalabrine, and how much notice would have been necessary. Under some circumstances – most, actually – not sending the local broadcast play-by-play voice and analyst to call at game in person would be frowned upon. A bad precedent could be set in which network executive decide having its broadcasts in-studio rather at an event comes across as authentic enough and decides doing it every now and then would be a wise money-saving measure. Eventually, every now and then becomes more often than not.
But NBC Sports Boston certainly deserves the benefit of the doubt here. If they were trying to get away with something, they never would have had Scalabrine pop in on the postgame show after the “road’’ broadcast. And it was Christmas, a time when it’s not always easy to be away from home.
Notes
Those of us who thought the NBA might see a Christmas Day upturn in its sagging ratings shot an airball with that theory: Year-over-year ratings for the four Christmas Day games on ESPN and ABC were down 10 percent.
The marquee matchup in prime time between the Lakers and Clippers didn’t do comparatively well, either. That game drew an average of 8.8 million viewers and was the most-watched television show of the night, but it was still down 14 percent from last year’s Lakers-Warriors matchup in the same window, which averaged 10.2 million. … Here’s one NBA television project that is certain to do well: ESPN released a new trailer this week for a 10-part documentary series on the Chicago Bulls dynasty. Titled “The Last Dance,’’ the series, which is a joint production of ESPN and Netflix and debuts in June, features a ton of never-before-seen footage from the Bulls’ last championship run in 1997-98. Michael Jordan cooperated with the documentary, which hasn’t always been his style with this sort of thing. A reason for Boston fans to watch: Larry Bird is among the luminaries and legends interviewed.
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