ESPN's Ricky Williams, er, SAL, is HORRIBLE!

Here's a funny article I ran across that pretty much sums up much of our thoughts on ESPN's coverage.

http://www.jsonline.com/sports/gen/nov02/95890.asp?showheadlines=all

Yo, ESPN, your NBA jive don't work

Last Updated: Nov. 14, 2002

SportsDay
Bob Wolfley

ESPN's presentation of the National Basketball Association has hatched and is still wobbling around on unsteady legs, but it's not too early to check in with some early impressions.

Tim Hardaway is ESPN's version of Eric Dickerson, with a twist. Dickerson at least spoke English most of the time. With Hardaway, English is his second language. Maybe third.

"The Mavericks ain't beat nobody," Hardaway said about Dallas' 5-0 start. "Dey beat Golden State, ah, ah, ah, Chicago. Right now, we on't know if dey real or unreal."

Hardaway has been one tough watch on "ESPN Shootaround" on Fridays.

Even if you allow for some measure of informal street dialect, Hardaway's lexicon is way beyond the line. Beyond that, his analysis is barely ordinary.

ESPN had to have an idea it wasn't getting Alistair Cooke because Hardaway was interviewed during his playing days on ESPN Radio and has been a guest analyst on Turner. He had the same troubles then.

Tim Legler and Sean Elliott, who handle ESPN2's studio show, "NBA Fast Break Tuesday," both are better than Hardaway. But Legler and Elliott are at a disadvantage. Neither of them is named Tim Hardaway.

Brad Nessler, the lead play-by-play guy, doesn't have any background in calling pro basketball games, but in the few games he has handled, he has been polished. You wouldn't know he doesn't have much experience based on his initial performances. But he isn't as good as Turner's Marv Albert - nobody is - and it won't be Albert calling the NBA Finals (Turner has the Western Conference Finals). It'll be Nessler in the Finals. We'll see if he's up to the big games.

Bill Walton is a solo act now, and that's probably not going to be good for viewers. ESPN's lead team should be a three-man operation. Another analyst needs to keep Walton in check, just as Steve Jones did when they were at NBC. It would add to the presence, the gravitas, to have a three-man No. 1 team at big games, or it would make garden-variety games seem as if they're a big deal. Turner has figured this out. All of their broadcast teams on Thursday are three-man teams. You just need the right three guys.

There's no Jim Gray on ESPN, and that's a shame. Yeah, there's a self-congratulatory, smug vibe with the guy, but he knew what questions to ask on the sideline when he worked NBC games. Guarantee he would would have been on top of the Rick Fox-Doug Christie fight in the Kings-Lakers game, unlike Sal Masekela, who was not.

The Tuesday show with Kevin Frazier, Legler and Elliott is an interesting amalgam of elements: commentary, live look-ins at as many as eight games and box scores in the making. It's interesting good rather than interesting bad. Frazier is energetic without being annoying. Legler is harder-edged than Elliott, who seems feistier in his game broadcast work than in the studio.

A little Stuart Scott goes a long way; the problem is he is being used a lot. His NBA programming role comes on Wednesday nights as a studio host. He has very good presence, good electricity, but he shorts out viewers because of all the self-consciously hip jargon.

He's terminally hip.

Language is supposed to be a tool you use to be understood. Does the average viewer, does the average ESPN viewer - and TV is supposed to be for the average viewer - even understand what the heck Scott is saying? Of course not.

And when he works, it always seems just a little bit too much about Stuart Scott, and not quite enough about just the telecast or game he's setting up.

ESPN needs to consider providing closed captioning for viewers when Scott works, so when he says, as he did the other day during a telecast of a Portland Trail Blazers game, "Yo, 'Sheed, dog," the caption would translate: "Have any of Rasheed Wallace's teammates taken him aside and told him his loss of self-control during games hurts the whole team?"

Or maybe picture-in-picture with Barbara Billingsley translating jive as she did so well in "Airplane."

You haven't lived until you see Scott talking to someone like John Madden and referring to him as "dog."

God forbid Scott could set up a game between New Jersey and San Antonio and say, "Jason Kidd" or "Tim Duncan" - you know, those boring names they were given at birth - instead of "JKidd" and "TDog."

ESPN truck guys need to get the timing, rhythm and accuracy of their graphics down soon. Graphics have come up at inappropriate times and have come down too soon, and some of the score boxes have carried the wrong score.

How come it looks and feels during some ESPN doubleheader nights that one game - the marquee game of the two - gets all the cameras, all the production attention and jazz, while the other game looks as if it got all of two cameras and appears to be a cable-access show rather than a national network production?