Kenny Beecham said on the Numbers On The Board podcast that the Golden State Warriors’ local broadcast is “the worst broadcast in the whole league by a wide margin, because every broadcast has to be biased.” He said it is “so jack*ssery where nobody can be wrong on the Warriors,” and that listening to it reminded him why he does not listen.
The take travelled. It is also, by the only measure anyone keeps, not a take at all.
Beecham Was Reacting to the Booth’s Defense of Draymond Green
Beecham was reacting to how Bob Fitzgerald and Kelenna Azubuike handled the Nov. 2 game against the Phoenix Suns, a 116-113 Golden State win in which Draymond Green was ejected. Green threw Khaman Maluach to the floor and escalated with Dillon Brooks, collecting the technicals that ended his night.
Beecham’s objection was not that the booth was sympathetic. It was that the sympathy survived contact with the footage: “Draymond grabbed Maluach, body-slammed him, and then choked Dillon Brooks!” Per Awful Announcing, the broadcasters defended Green’s actions.
Three Years at the Bottom of a Reader-Graded Survey
Awful Announcing runs annual rankings of local NBA announcing teams, graded by its readers. The Golden State broadcast has finished last three years running. The recurring criticisms in those gradings are that Fitzgerald is condescending and that the booth’s homerism is excessive.
So Beecham did not discover anything. He arrived at a conclusion a standing survey has produced three times, prompted by a play clear enough that the defence of it became the story. That is a different thing from a creator having a bad night with a telecast, and it is why the clip moved.
The Structural Problem Is the Part Nobody Can Fix
Every local broadcast is partisan. That is the arrangement: the team’s rightsholder hires the booth, the audience is the team’s audience, and nobody tunes into a Golden State telecast for neutral officiating analysis. Beecham conceded this in the same breath he used to condemn it — every broadcast has to be biased is the premise of his complaint, not an exception to it.
The line he is drawing is between partisanship and the inability to concede anything. A booth that says a call was harsh is doing its job. A booth that cannot say a player was wrong after he put two opponents on the floor has stopped describing the game, and a viewer who can see the replay knows it.
Which is also why nothing is likely to change. The booth is not failing at its brief; it is executing one that a national audience finds unwatchable and a local rightsholder has no commercial reason to revise. The people voting it last three years running are, mostly, not the people it is sold to.
Source: Qwame Skinner of Awful Announcing, which first reported Beecham’s comments and runs the local announcer rankings
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