Great News: NBC Sports Philadelphia Sending Broadcast Teams Back on the Road
After almost two years of calling road games remotely from the Wells Fargo Center because of Covid-19 protocols, Flyers announcers Jim Jackson and Keith Jones were back in the booth when the team faced off against the New York Islanders Tuesday night in Long Island. And 76ers announcers Kate Scott and Alaa Abdelnaby will be hitting the road again soon.
NBC Sports Philadelphia, which has the television broadcast rights to both Flyers and 76ers games, confirmed that Jackson and Jones will travel to road games moving forward with limited exceptions. A source familiar with the situation said those exceptions would primarily be because of stricter Covid protocols when the Flyers visit one of the NHL’s eight Canadian teams.
An NBCSP spokesman said Scott and Abdelnaby will begin traveling for road games next week — most likely for the 76ers’ Feb. 4 matchup against the Dallas Mavericks — though some potential exceptions apply there as well.
Great news all around. Now fans can get a better broadcast and the talent isn’t stuck inside a Philly studio. You just can’t call a decent game remotely if you’re Kate Scott or Jim Jackson. You’re looking at a monitor. You’re stuck with whatever camera angles you can get, and you don’t have the natural energy of the crowd to feed off of. Try getting hyped for Flyers hockey while sitting inside a studio. You’d have to pull off an acting job better than Rami Malek in Bohemian Rhapsody.
Beyond that, you have issues trying to get the sound sync’d up with the video feed, and sometimes there are things taking place in the arena that you can see in person, but not on television. Imagine, for instance, Kate and Alaa trying to navigate the Carmelo vs. fan thing if it happened in Los Angeles and they were stuck watching a television in their studio. All they can do is react to the camera shots they’re given and they’re unable to fill you in on what’s taking place.
It was a little funky overall, because while the TV crews weren’t traveling this season, the radio crews were traveling, and so it created this weird “why aren’t they doing it?” juxtaposition. It made it seem like NBC Sports Philadelphia was being cheap, which may or may not be true, but the bottom line is that it’s less complicated and less costly to do radio than television. It’s a differently world logistically. Regardless, the quality of the broadcasts will improve now. We’ve been living with COVID long enough to know how to pull this off and get things back to normal.
