The news of ESPN laying off Zach Lowe hit like a slap in the face to basketball diehards online.
Since his days at Celtics Hub and Sports Illustrated , Lowe merged the colloquialisms of the basketball internet with a fluency in coach and exec speak. In the years after, at Grantland and then the worldwide leader, Lowe brought analytics and modern strategy into the foreground and became perhaps the most celebrated basketball analyst — if not sports analyst — in the industry. After years of layoffs and reorgs at ESPN, Lowe appeared to be smart and versatile enough to stay alive as a salve for some of the network’s more vanilla coverage.
Lowe’s departure will be felt in Bristol and among ESPN audiences. He was a regular on NBA Today and Get Up , hosted a popular podcast, and wrote consistently great features for the website.
Without his work, ESPN NBA coverage will be different. But his departure is the end of a trend dating back years, not the beginning of a shakeup.
On The Bill Simmons Podcast Thursday, Ringer media writer Bryan Curtis asked if ESPN doesn’t have room for Lowe, who does it have room for?
A popular NFL podcaster went viral on X by writing, “It’s like month by month we’re watching the company that used to define sports media wither away into nothing of substance.”
But on the NBA side, Lowe was a holdover, not an emblem. The rest of ESPN’s NBA coverage looked nothing like his. Lowe did not leave ESPN this week because it chose louder, hotter analysis. He left because that choice was made a long time ago, and he could only run from that diktat for so long.
It’s a strange irony that Adrian Wojnarowski retired within a week of Lowe’s layoff. While ESPN often paired them around big transaction cycles for content, Wojnarowski helped till the land that would soon prove unlivable for analysts like Lowe.
When Wojnarowski arrived at ESPN in 2017, he shepherded a reinvention of the network’s approach to basketball. The innovative TrueHoop Network was dismantled , its pioneering leaders Henry Abbott and Jade Hoye following shortly after. There was no room for Marc Stein, who prided himself on deeper reporting and a real personality.
When a hot-mic scandal pushed Rachel Nichols out the door , ESPN hastily traded the personality of The Jump for the more straightforward NBA Today . Quietly, Jump producer Kevin Wildes and recurring cohost Amin El-Hassan followed Nichols to greener pastures.
Longform NBA writers like Jackie MacMullan and Tom Haberstroh were filtered out in favor of news gatherers like Tim Bontemps and Bobby Marks.
When JJ Redick arrived in late 2021, he was shocked at what he found . That the longtime sharpshooter likely never broached a partnership with the network for his podcast is evidence enough that the industry was bypassing ESPN, but Redick was also openly frustrated by the topics he was forced to discuss on First Take and NBA Today .
Redick implored ESPN to approach his sport with more thoughtfulness. Two years later, he tried his best to do it himself in the network’s top NBA booth after ESPN churned through Jeff Van Gundy, Mark Jackson, and Doc Rivers. Redick even offered ESPN analysts Tim Legler and Richard Jefferson the platform for more curious coverage that ESPN routinely denied them. This disrupter now coaches the Lakers .
ESPN was never going to put up a proper business around Lowe’s massive podcast, and they stopped truly caring about writing years ago. But Lowe could have been used in the television slots occupied by Stephen A. Smith, or even Bob Myers. If the network wanted to get creative, it could have tried him in a broadcast booth rather than whatever freelance coach or player called up the suits each summer. Why not have Lowe beam in for a postgame with Scott Van Pelt once or twice a week?
Lowe’s salary was quickly thrown out as the impetus behind his firing. But unlike Robert Griffin III or Samantha Ponder , two NFL broadcasters who met a similar fate in August, Lowe wore many hats for ESPN. This is only a budget move insofar as ESPN refuses to build up the aspects of its business where Lowe mattered.
Yet the Griffin and Ponder examples are valuable here, too. Those two were stuck in narrow studio roles making outsized salaries. Many of their NFL counterparts hold similar job descriptions to Lowe. Do Kevin Clark, Ben Solak, Domonique Foxworth, or Bill Barnwell do much that Lowe did not? What about MLB writer David Schoenfield? One has to wonder if their salaries are so much more manageable than his.
ESPN has room for people like this. Whether it’s because they have nabbed better talent on the NFL side or simply can justify it to their Disney bosses because football is a bigger cash cow, some at the network clearly see the value of work like Lowe’s.
This was not necessary and isn’t always how ESPN operates. Yet over the years, the push from ESPN chairman Jimmy Pitaro and other executives hollowed out ESPN’s basketball coverage in favor of Woj’s brand of breaking news and Stephen A. Smith’s bombast. Laying off Lowe was simply the finishing touch.
The post Long before laying off Zach Lowe, ESPN had given up on smart NBA analysis appeared first on Awful Announcing .
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