ESPN Depriving World Of Incredible Theatre - A Brian Windhorst NBA True Crime Style TV Show
Everyone has seen the Brian Windhorst monologue from ESPN's First Take last week. Windy isn't the most online guy and had a busy weekend with his wife and 4-year old son after being on the road for eight of the last nine weeks. They had social events to host around the 4th of July that have kept him occupied and he's denied a bunch of media requests to speak on the iconic speech he gave. That is until he spoke in-depth on it with Pable S. Torres on Windy's Pod The Hoop Collective. And some interesting things were revealed.
Windy admitted to having very good intel that Rudy Gobert would be traded soon. But it wasn't locked in. He intentionally wanted to be vague so that he didn't spend the rest of the day putting out fires from Gobert's agent and teams asking why he was reporting that Gobert would be traded soon. The fact that it wasn't 100% done also aided in that. Windy is also on the record as not being a fan of aggregation. So if he goes on a long rant and at the end says, "Gobert likely to be traded", the ESPN bottomline and everything that would get picked up on twitter would be just that. Likely reading: Report: Windhorst says Gobert likely to be dealt or something of that ilk. So Windy played it absolutely perfectly while being intentionally vague while also being incredibly on the nose. He is a big fan of podcasts and story-telling, so with Stephen A. Smith, Chris "Mad Dog" Russo and others out on the Friday before a holiday weekend, he knew he had to put the team on his back so to speak.
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But things got even more interesting in the interview when Torres asked Windy if he'd be open to doing more stuff like that. Reporting on basketball in a theatric way that leaves the audience both guessing and wanting more. To my surprise, that is exactly what Windy wants to do.
He cites ESPN won't go for it as they are all data driven and the numbers say people wouldn't tune into that as much. To which I'd say, "REALLY?!" Who amongst us wouldn't want a little theatre behind some of the greatest characters in one of the most popular sports continually moving teams? I feel like this would be one of the most captivating shows, certainly of the summer. I'd also love some of this going on during the NBA season which is literally every other season. It appears like Brian Windhorst agrees, but ESPN won't approve it which is a damn shame because they are really depriving the world of the next great TV show.