As ESPN cuts familiar faces, its retreat from serious NBA coverage is complete

As ESPN cuts expert voices and rewards viral argument, fans who want to understand basketball are building a smarter conversation elsewhere

A fter the Phoenix Suns dumped the Golden State Warriors out of last season’s play-in, Stephen A Smith settled behind the First Take desk to explain why Steve Kerr might have coached his last game. Midway through the burial, he claimed the Warriors hadn’t “been to the playoffs since that championship in 2022” – a four-year drought in his telling – before grumbling that Golden State could pay someone far less than $17m a year to miss the postseason.

Cool. Except the drought never happened. Golden State reached the conference semi-finals in 2023 and again in 2025. ESPN anchor Shae Cornette, who had command of the basic facts, tried to smuggle that inconvenient reality into the discussion. It went nowhere. Apparently, nobody on an ESPN set is permitted to correct the franchise “star”. Only weeks earlier, Smith had been inducted into the National Black College Alumni Hall of Fame for his work in media.

That morning’s mistake was ESPN’s quality control in miniature: its highest-paid voice mangling an easily checked fact about a league the network pays $2.6bn a year to televise. How much would it have cost Smith – or anyone on his staff – to spend 30 seconds checking before he went on air?

Smith churns out more than 3,000 takes a year , and there’s no way in hell he watches full games on the regular, not anymore, which is why he botches even his own team, the New York Knicks, when discussing them. Last summer on SportsCenter, while pencilling New York back into the conference finals on the strength of Mike Brown’s arrival, he ran through the returning core and rechristened Miles McBride as “Michael”. Knicks fans had seen the act before. A year earlier, Smith credited a hot streak to Quentin Grimes, whom the team had already traded to Detroit. He later explained that he had somehow confused Grimes with McBride. In the same rant, Smith waved away Isaiah Hartenstein – then the Knicks’ starting center – as “some dude name Hartenstein”.

The circus extends beyond the studio. Late last month, ESPN told Ryan Clark he had been fired during a commercial break in the middle of taping NFL Live. He never returned to the set. The next morning, the network showed Karl Ravech the door after 33 years, then kept cutting. Cam Newton, Tom Pelissero and a long line of producers were among the other casualties , even as ESPN absorbed NFL Media into its operation. The reason is no mystery: ESPN has a nasty math problem. Its reach peaked at nearly 100 million cable households in 2011, as Kendall Baker noted in Axios , before falling below 68m by 2024 and to roughly 55m today . Meanwhile, its annual rights bills for the NBA, NFL, College Football Playoff and SEC total around $8bn. Add November’s YouTube TV blackout, which burned nearly $100m in 15 days , and the spring layoffs look like a network trying to save its ass.

When ESPN laid off Zach Lowe in September 2024 , it discarded the last person on its payroll who could dissect a possession on television and leave viewers understanding more about basketball.