ESPN does an outstanding job with its NBA coverage. The network has an army of insiders, journalists, analysts, a daily noon show, as well as a stellar game streaming quality that has long sated this high schooler who wasn’t happy to see his beloved NBA on NBC gone forever.
But despite everything ESPN does right, it never quite figured out the best way to introduce NBA games. They feature the NBA Finals on ABC, one of the biggest sporting events in the world, but the theme has always felt a bit off. It’s not like the NFL on Fox, CBS College Football, March Madness or The Masters. When you hear the rhythm of these events, it’s both nostalgia and mood music. They are almost Pavlovian in that they prepare sports fans for these specific events in seconds.
With the new NBA season just two weeks away, what ESPN is working on in the studio has been revealed – their new NBA theme song. This is part of a brand new layout that includes a new, much smaller scoring bug, and it will identify teams by what color they wear for that particular game.
You can never go wrong with the horns when introducing a sporting event. The crisp, bold sound of these instruments can tip viewers into sports mode. All national shows try to be cool to better reach their young audience, so why not break out the drum machine? The intro music should grow on me after a while. I don’t hate it, but I was also indifferent to old music. It’s because the NBA can roam the earth forever and will never find anything as good as John Tesh’s Roundball Rock.
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That first Sunday after the end of the football season was sad, until the silhouette of the peacock formed on that old Zenith television, and then the colors filled in feather by feather as the music built , and then, boom! Those strings have struck and it’s time for Michael Jordan and Patrick Ewing to do battle as the Chicago Bulls take on the New York Knicks.
Tesh told The Ringer in 2020 that the song came from a melody he was thinking in his head while he was in France, so he called his answering machine in Los Angeles to have it recorded so he wouldn’t forget it. He demoed it on a synthesizer, and although NBC Sports president Dick Ebersol liked it, he wanted a full orchestra. Because hey, Boston Pops, Larry Bird, why not? Tesh paid for an orchestra out of his own pocket and went on to compose a tune as synonymous with the 90s as “Come on, come on, Power Rangers.”
Themes should above all be sticky. NBC had a ton of those at the time. A different world, Cheers, The show tonight. Each theme probably started playing in your head the moment you read the name of the show.
It wasn’t just the music that made NBA on NBC epic. It was Marv Albert and Bob Costas narrating during the intro. It wasn’t Brent Musberger and Pat O’Brien repeatedly interrupted by the 1980s Macintosh theme and graphics that were shaping Boston Garden. Albert and Costas made the games feel big by giving opening monologues that weren’t just, “Isiah Thomas and his Bad Boy Pistons are out for revenge, but Magic Johnson isn’t ready to put the 80s back to the Pistons” On NBC you get “Hakeem Olajuwon’s acting has exhausted all superlatives.”
During the 2022 NBA Finals, the intro was just player statements to the media about whatever the production team decided to use that week. It was slick and looked slick, but it didn’t really kick up the energy for the game. Combine that with the fact that instead of showing the starting lineup presentations in the stadium, ABC spends two to three minutes running promos for Saint-Moly, and the rest of its summer programming. Sorry, though I still laugh when Rob Riggle yells “Shut that baby!” in The hangoverhearing him make a corny joke while someone gets knocked down in the water during a putt doesn’t put me in the mood for a basketball championship.
For more than two decades, this ESPN and NBA partnership has worked like a charm. He dramatically expanded ESPN’s live events portfolio and gave the NBA a consistent presence on America’s premier sports network.
They may have all the gold, but they’ll never be, to us who remember, what Roundball Rock and NBC were for us NBA fans. I’m sure it keeps ESPN and the NBA awake at night as they’re doused in cash.