PORTLAND, Ore. – Entering an NBA stadium during a pandemic is a surreal experience. The front of the Fashion Center loading dock has not changed, however, you will now need to pass a temperature check and report a disclaimer before entering. The murals of the most important moments in the history of the Portland Trail Blazers are still in place, but crowds of team personnel and members of the media are missing.
The stadium’s ground has not been touched since Tool held there on the night of March 11, when news of Rudy Gobert’s positive COVID-19 control in Oklahoma City and the NBA suspension spread. But located in a studio, The Blazers’ transmission director, Jeff Curtin, oversees a team that broadcasts game screens that simulate normalcy thousands of miles from the action in central Florida.
In a general house game, the team would have several cameras of its own. For the NBA reboot, in which local networks will continue to broadcast games on the market the first circular playoffs, each team is running the same set of camera streams provided through the league from the orlando area’s internal bubble.
It took some testing and error, and months to make plans with the league, for Blazers and other organizations to figure out how to safely stream games from outside the bubble. Plexiglass separators now separate producers, all masked and seated as far as you can imagine in a small room with a wall of monitors appearing at other angles of action. Some staff members were forced to leave the control room and move to the cabins. Curtin estimates that the other 12 to 15 people in Moda Center who generate those games constitute an organization 40% smaller than he regularly had on hand for a home game before the break.
In a studio near the room, broadcaster Jordan Kent and color commentator Lamar Hurd sit on a socially estranged desk, canceling the game on a set of monitors appearing at the same angles as the production team extracts streams from the league. In the lobby, touch reporter Brooke Olzendam plays a dual role as a studio presenter before and after the game while interviewing players and coaches in Zoom.
“I’m almost in the workplace [alone] for 4 hours,” Olzendam says. “You’d laugh if you were there. In the fourth room, I jump out of my seat, hit the table, sometimes I get up. But I watch the game, and all the trends I notice, I’m verbally trading with my producers. This is as close to what I knew as it was before, only without the atmosphere and bells and whistles.”
Throughout the league, local broadcasters have been forced to reconsider whether they do their job.
“I sense how much I miss the nuances of the game,” says Sarah Kustok, a color analyst at Brooklyn Nets. “The detail I would check to provide the viewer you get when you watch the guys live who just watch it like everyone else on the TV monitor… You see something expanding on the ground and you need to look at the bench or look at a guy off the ball or out of the game. These are the kinds of things I feel I don’t see constantly without seeing real stocks live. You miss a lot of these things, just call a monitor.”
The NBA has made every effort to make those fan-free games at Disney World Resort feel as normal as possible. There is crowd noise, virtual enthusiasts on video cards and music playing on the AP. For the most part of other people who see at home, TV screens have been strangely close to normal. But there’s no way to well simulate the adrenaline that comes with being in the middle of a crowd of 20,000 enthusiasts in times of crisis. Commentators will have to make a conscious effort to combat the detachment of their remote studies.
“[You] try to put yourself as an announcer in closed matches or exciting situations,” Hurd says. “But the environment you’re really in, in the studio that’s silent, doesn’t make it any easier. There are some games where I find myself falling into an environment where only me and someone else are. The studio and we’re just hanging out. But then it’s a closed game, and maybe an exciting game just happened, so you do it again.”
The streams that broadcasters can watch on their monitors are the same as the NBA provides to all groups for their programs. The league offers six camera angles for each game, adding a blank flow of the entire court and several angles of choice for local market manufacturers to do whatever they want. This is enough to make the ultimate TV product stand out in a general game, although the small number of perspectives is incredibly restrictive for broadcasters.
“Personally, I feel so disconnected,” says Brian Sieman, a play-by-play announcer for the Los Angeles Clippers. “It’s mentally very uncomfortable. I almost feel like I’m watching a game through a knot a hundred yards away, and I’m looking to interpret what’s going on without any communication. Turn around the block just to the next one.”
Most regional networks on the team use some variants of the Blazers’ configuration, with in-air skills running in their arena studies. The Milwaukee Bucks adopted an exclusive technique by installing their driveroom in the team locker room at the Fiserv Forum.
“It’s anything new, it’s anything else and it’s kind of consistent that enthusiasts see,” says Bucks color analyst Marques Johnson. “Coming to you live from the Bucks locker room!” I fell in love with this concept. It works well for a lot of things. For me, as an older man, the bathroom is there. The area is beautiful. The distance works well for Jim [Paschke, Bucks play-by-play announcer] and me; we are at a distance of 10 to 12 feet at all times. “
Kustok faced a rare challenge that began the reget. He worked some games with Ryan Ruocco, who was in the studio with her. But Ian Eagle, the team’s leading player consistent with the game, is also calling up national games for TNT, so he’s been in the bubble since the start of qualifying games in late July. When he and Kustok gather Nets games, they get stuck with FaceTime for visual cues that arise naturally when they’re in the same room.
“It’s wild,” Kustok says. “You are reminded that the things you say in this room through yourself are televised … You’re literally muting the sound. I know when I think Ian will talk, based on the speed of the game. But it was definitely one of the most exclusive broadcast reports of a game I’ve ever had.”
Hurd had summoned some remote games in its previous use on the Pac-12 network, basically as a backup plan in case of technical problems in the arena. But for maximum stations, it’s a new experience.
“I’ve never done this before,” Sieman says. “When you audition for jobs, sometimes it happens. But you call a quarter, and most of the time, you know what’s going on. Most of the time, you don’t call a game where you have no idea how the event. is developing.”
Accelerated security measures have also been an adjustment. Speakers are required to wear a mask at all times, when running in front of the camera. This includes what they call the game. From the beginning, Johnson wore his mask under his nose several times for convenience, but was temporarily reprimanded through the league office.
“I thought, ‘How did you know?'” he recalls. “But it’s a smart thing that they’re more sensible that way. They’re strict with those protocols. It’s another kind of new normal, but it’s a smart thing to do.”
In a pre-pandemic world, preparing an announcer’s game meant only reviewing statistics and research, but also having casual verbal exchanges with players and coaches to learn more about what’s happening with the team. If Hurd had been with the Blazers after his August 8 loss to the Clippers, he may have simply had a personal verbal exchange with Damian Lillard to get the full story of his enmity with Paul George and Patrick Beverley, who spread on Instagram, just in case. I needed to get it on the air.
Without this access, analysts rely solely on their own institutional wisdom from the groups that canopy to provide angles of the story and shape the narrative of their programs.
“If you were to start a whole new season with another team, what separates me from the enthusiasts?” Sieman said. “Your willingness to take a look at statistics would be the only difference. What we have is one of the things that separates us and gives us the opportunity to tell the story to the enthusiasts of any team that follows.”
Not being in construction can also cause advertisers to miss stories that are positioned on the ground, which are contextualized at times larger when they occur.
“I don’t see Giannis and Moe Wagner tangled up in a room where they could have had two possessions before the blow to the head,” Johnson said of the moment the Bucks superstar was ejected and suspended last week. “I would have said, ‘Uh-oh, better keep an eye on Giannis and Moe. These two got tangled up and there were words. It’s a hot spot. It’s better to keep an eye on that.’ I may have done it before. But now all I see is the finished product. I can watch some repetitions to check it out and recreate it, but I miss the story. I don’t see what that led to that. I hate him as an announcer.”
No one knows when the NBA will return to the arenas. Many main points about the 2020-21 season are still to be dictated through the imaginable progression of a COVID-19 vaccine. Next season is unlikely to start on time and even more than enthusiasts to be allowed to return to the arenas soon.
NBA broadcasters don’t yet have a selection to adapt to the realities of the pandemic, but none of them are satisfied about it. Until they can be in the same room as the players they cover, they use tactics to make it work.
“This may be the new normal,” Johnson says. “Maybe that’s how we’re going to do things over the next year or two. Who knows?”
Sean Highkin covers the NBA for Bleacher Report and co-hosts the Bulls vs. Podcast. Bulls. Blazers. He’s been in Portland lately. His paintings have been revered through the Association of Professional Basketball Writers. Follow him on Twitter, Instagram and in the B/R app.