With the NBA playoffs on the rise, TV networks and viewing audiences are on par for one first-round series in particular: the Portland Trail Blazers vs. the Los Angeles Lakers, with Damian Lillard, the hottest player since the NBA reboot, against LeBron James, the best basketball player of this generation.
The matchup, which starts tonight on TNT, will understandably be shown in prime time. But while the showdown figures are an injury to reviewers, there’s a good chance it could also be a pain in the neck for the networks – at least for those who handle the audio work for them.
Without audience noise, networks would have to rely much more heavily on production tactics to ensure that foul language did not slip through the cracks of broadcasts. This has included reducing the volume of microphones on the court and around the edge, as the audio mutes for three seconds at a time. Those people who are tasked with producing clean audio during telecasts will probably get a workout this week: The Blazers have one of the NBAs most established pillows on the court in Carmelo Anthony.
An analysis of the Blazers’ four TNT telecasts since the restart marks the extent to which Anthony and his teammates put more pressure on TV producers to shake furiously to find the dump button. In those leagues, Portland had to win to reach its playoff chance, there were at least 57 cases in which the audio dropped out, both in part and in full, presumably to cover foul language.
Although it is almost undetectable who exactly does the swearing since the audio is generally suppressed, we can still draw a few conclusions. TNT audio dropped once every three minutes – or 16 times per 48 minutes – when Anthony was on the court, up from once every five minutes (9.6 times per 48 minutes) when Anthony was sidelined. Perhaps most tellingly, when Anthony was on the court, he was directly involved in nearly 28 percent of the plays on which the audio was dropped.
None of this would come as a surprise to Portland, who quickly became accustomed to Anthony’s colorful language – especially when he goes for boards and wants teammates to clean them up so he can catch them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kbm3cPAhAXI
When Blazers coach Terry Stotts was asked about Anthony’s focal style on the glass and the extra networking it provides to networks, he responded by asking, “Are you talking about FOH?” an acronym meaning lost. The coach said he did not see Anthony’s focal nature – as the atmospheric element of it – as all that unusual, and said that Hall of Famer Gary Payton, whom he coached as an assistant in Seattle, was also very talkative.
We do not want to suggest that Anthony and the Blazers have the fullest mouths, necessarily. In fact, there is reason to believe that at least some of the swearing in Portland games actually came from opponents who find themselves at the end of their minds. try to defend Lillard, whose firing range has essentially revealed boundaries. (In at least three cases, TNT’s audio dropped to a made Lillard jumper.)
Apples-to-apples comparisons make getting a sense of where the Blazers stand relative to the rest of the league complicated for several reasons. For starters, TNT is apparently much freer with its muting than ESPN. (And because the Blazers were in hot pursuit after the last playoff spot in the West, they were shown on regular broadcasts more often than most of the other teams in the bubble.) Another challenge: Certain games – like the Mavs-Clippers matchup on August 6, with 14 full mutes with the audio dropping completely for seconds at a time – presented much louder audio on the court, making it easier to tell when the network noise dropped immediately to something to cover.
However, in a four-game sample on TNT that did not include Portland, we found that audio fell slightly less frequently – 47 times in total, or about 12 times per 48 minutes – than during Blazers games.
Regardless of where Portland can rank as a club when swearing in on the court, there is little doubt about Anthony’s status. “He’s leading the NBA in ‘I Have It,'” TNT Ian Eagle said after Anthony wrote during a rebound, and his voice rang in one of the microphones on the backboard.
For his part, Anthony – who has rescued himself in Portland after an abrupt exit from Houston, among other things by hitting a number of coupling strips too late since the reboot – said his incorrect wording is mostly a way to hype himself.
“For a long time, the guys who rebounded at a high level did it with a style, or some kind of fashion, where they were loud, and they managed it with it,” Anthony said. “That’s what I do, just try to make it fun and just let people know I have it.”
If Anthony is active last night on the glass and during this first round, do not be surprised if TNT is just as active in using the dump button. Based on what we have seen and heard from the SBA so far, it would be par for the course.
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