It has been popular to criticize Isiah Thomas’ performance as the lead analyst during his rookie season in the courtside headset, a performance that is center stage as the Chicago Bulls and Utah Jazz battle for the NBA title in games telecast, with aggravating overkill, by NBC.
It is certainly true that Thomas describing a National Basketball Association game is like a discount weathervane on a blustery day: Whichever way the momentum blows, whatever play happens to cause basketball to touch inside of net, he is ready to label it the best possible strategy.
Thomas is especially notable for his untenable, knee-jerk defense of Dennis Rodman, his former teammate with the evil Detroit Pistons. If the Bulls’ flagrant forward were to be caught choking Utah Jazz guard John Stockton during Wednesday night’s fourth game (8 p.m., WMAQ-Ch. 5), Thomas would explain that’s just the way Dennis is: He needs to have his hands around an annoying guy’s throat to get motivated.
But whatever Thomas’ flaws, you have to take into account that he is still learning. If NBC cast him in a key role before he was ready, a la Brooke Shields and Jenny McCarthy, blame NBC. Balanced by the late-season addition of ex-Bulls’ coach Doug Collins, Thomas seems overall a plus for his first-hand knowledge of how the modern game is played and the men who play it.
More troublesome is that NBC, despite the excellence of its replays and camera work during the games, is guilty of an often exasperating overproduction around the edges, starting with its veritable soccer team of on-air personalities. In addition to its announcing trio and two sideline reporters, also on hand are a pregame and halftime anchor and three analysts, not one of whom comes close to the energy, insight and style Chicago viewers are used to getting from Fox Sports Channel’s Norm Van Lier.
The network promotes pro forma halftime interviews with players as if the subjects were harder to land than J.D. Salinger. And some of its graphics are so busy with moving words and images, you need a freeze-frame function to find the relevant statistics.
But these things are less important to a fan’s TV enjoyment than how the game itself is called, which is why the guy in the lead announcing chair–the broadcast team’s point guard–is so important.
And after a season of watching intently, I have to reluctantly conclude that basketball just doesn’t quite click for play-by-play man Costas, a fellow who has been praised to the heavens, sometimes by me, for his past TV work.
Costas sparkled as the host of “Later,” the late-late-night talk show where he often did the improbable: coaxed surprising information out of media-numb and image-savvy stars.
As an announcer of baseball, his true love, Costas’ passion for and knowledge of the game is obvious. Costas–and it can’t all be the guy whispering in his earpiece–rattles off obscure statistics like Alan Greenspan talking interest rates. And his quite conscious cleverness–wordplay, pop references, and seamless transitions–provides an entertaining counterpoint to the summer game’s sluggish rhythms.
But put him courtside at a basketball game and it all just seems a little off–not bad, exactly, but needlessly attention-drawing and not up to the usual standards. First, though, credit where due: Costas does an expert job managing the broadcast, keeping viewers apprised of the big picture via relevant statistics and history. He has the good sense to sound embarrassed at the ridiculous number of previews for prime-time programs NBC makes him read during free throws. He will occasionally get off an entirely appropriate gem of an aside.
But more often his cleverness plays as precious, even smug, when set against the faster-paced action of playoff basketball. On Sunday he talked about the Goodyear blimp fleet, which he termed “an oxymoron, because no blimp is fleet.” Such look-at-me remarks, however clever, break the spell cast by the games’ intensity.
His constant sniping at Rodman is not only unbecoming an allegedly impartial announcer, it demonstrates a misreading of the zeitgeist. While everybody else, including Rodman, seems to be over Dennis’ hair and antics, Costas still seems hung up on it all, like the student-council president who can’t believe what the lovable bad boy gets away with.
But perhaps most evident to a basketball aficionado is that while Costas knows the rules and the terminology, he seems to have no special feel for the game, a weakness that shows when what happened is not obvious. A not atypical Costas moment, from Friday’s game two: “And there’s a Utah foul. It’s on Malone. No, make it a three-second violation.”
Preference in sports announcers is a very personal thing. I like the White Sox team of Ken Harrelson and Tom Paciorek, for instance, who I know drive some sports fans to watch PBS.
So much of what I’ll be thinking Wednesday night, as I listen to Costas perhaps reprise his snipe about Rodman demonstrating the difference between idiosyncratic and idiotic, is that the guy I really want in that chair is a different sort of bad boy. Come back to the booth, Marv Albert.
