It seems there are fewer and fewer sports announcers I really dig these days, but Gus Johnson is definitely one of them. With that in mind, I got pretty excited to learn that for at least one night, he’ll be the voice of the Pistons, subbing for George Blaha, who will be attending his other duties as Michigan State’s play-by-play man as the Spartans play in the Champs Sports Bowl. (Johnson usually does radio for the Knicks, but fortunately New York is off.) From the Detroit News:
Broadcaster Gus Johnson has covered a lot of big events in nearly two decades — Olympics, the NFL, NCAA Tournament, play-by-play for the Knicks.
Despite all that, Johnson says broadcasting tonight’s Pacers-Pistons game (8, Channel 4) will top his career highlight list.
“I’m just a Detroit boy who grew up loving the Pistons, and now I get to come full-circle for one night,” said Johnson, who grew up in the Livernois and Davison area. “I’m nervous, excited, it’s getting me a little choked up, really.”
I’ll actually be at the Palace covering the game for HOOPSWORLD, but with Johnson on the mic, I’ll also be recording the game to watch on Saturday. Not that I expect Pistons-Pacers to match UCLA-Gonzaga (watch for a young Arron Afflalo), but I’m really curious to hear him call his hometown team.
If League Pass doesn’t show the Detroit feed this will turn from very exciting news for me into extremely upsetting news.
Fox Sports Indiana? Two nights in a row? I’m unimpressed Mr. League Pass, very unimpressed.
Which raises the question: how do they decide which broadcast to use? And how can we influence them?
OT: Kurt at TrueHoop (filling in for Henry) has a piece up about the use of audio and video on team websites.
“…go to the Lakers Web site and you can watch almost nine minutes of interviews after yesterday’s practice with a number of Lakers as well as Jackson. These are the same interviews that the beat writers are getting their quotes and information from, but you can watch them unfiltered.
“After going to a few practices and hearing the conversations first hand I was surprised by how different they came out in the next day’s paper,” said Ty Nowell, Website Content Manager for the Lakers. “Our beat guys do a pretty good job of staying true to what is said, but there’s still so much that can get lost in the translation, so we started posting the raw audio on the site for everyone to listen to.”
Now the Lakers post video a few hours after every home practice and game (plus some road games), and Los Angeles is far from alone. Almost every team now has full time writers for their Web site and also are putting up some video, all of this aiming to do what the Internet does best - tear down walls of separation. Team sites are adapting to the Web in a way that newspapers and most other traditional media are not right now.”
It’s good for fans that teams have more content but if there is a market for it on the team website there is also a market for it on newspaper websites. I’d view that audio and video posted alongside the analysis of beat reporters if it was available but if it’s not I’m going to read less coverage because I only have so much time. If the NBA team websites are scooping the press with the full interviews, why WOULDN’T I read the team websites instead of things like ESPN, HOOPSWORLD, and Yahoo! Sports?