ESPN’s coverage of the NBA Draft Combine must improve

ESPN’s coverage of the NBA Draft Combine must improve

The 2025 NBA Draft is vast approaching. We learned the results of the draft lottery on Monday. We’re just over one month away from the actual draft–a two-day event–with the biggest event for every prospect until then being the draft combine, which is this week.

The measurements and drills were completed Tuesday, but the real meat and potatoes of the combine are the scrimmages, broadcasted on ESPN. The 2025 cycle marks the seventh year that the worldwide leader is broadcasting the four scrimmages–two on each day.

While it’s cool that the NBA is the lone North American professional sport that prospects actually scrimmage at their respective combine pre-draft, the production of the event is an all-around mess, and it needs to be fixed.

ESPN must do a better job showing the product they’re broadcasting during NBA Draft Combine:

Let me make this is clear: None of this is to disparage Bobby Marks, Seth Greenberg, Cory Alexander or Sean Farnham. They can only do their job the way the production is designed, and I would argue they do a good job at that. But ESPN is objectively bad at broadcasting the actual product on the floor during the draft combine–the only reason why viewers are watching in the first place.

If you’re going to televise the scrimmages, show the scrimmages. It’s so simple. But every year, ESPN’s coverage of the draft combine scrimmages features an over-abundance of interviews that mask over what’s happening on the court.

During Wednesday’s scrimmages (Day 1), they interviewed Cooper Flagg and Dylan Harper–who are expected to go No. 1 and 2 overall in next month’s draft–in addition to prospect Cedric Coward, ESPN NBA insider Shams Charania, Houston head coach Kelvin Sampson and Todd Golden, the reigning national championship head coach from Florida.

They also mixed conversation with lead draft analyst Jonathan Givony, but their discussions were few and far between. For the most part, viewers were missing sections of the scrimmages due to these interviews.

We (the viewer) tune in to watch the prospects that we’ve been evaluating for the last several months or even years (depending on how long they’ve been in school). This is the first (and only) time that we are able to see these prospects compete against their peers before the draft, analyzing how each player performs in this pressurized environment in front of evaluators with players they’ve never played with before.

It’s a job interview, but ESPN shows as much of the interview as they do the actual games when they’re happening. Would it help to show the job interview, not the side interview(s)?

To a certain extent, I understand that they want to further market the next generation of potential stars to share their stories, talk about their own pre-draft experience and allow viewers to put name to face. That’s it.

The Mavericks aren’t expected to trade the No. 1 pick

However, let’s talk about what’s happening in front of us on the court instead of off-the-court. That’s been a sport-wide issue with the NBA forever; people would rather talk about the drama with analysts diminishing the product (disingenuously, too) than the sport itself.

It’s been a problem forever and it can’t continue. An easy solution is to broadcast the measurements and drills (similar to the NFL), which would allow more players to conduct interviews with the media after. Not to mention, more than just two days of live coverage couldn’t be bad for viewership … right?!

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