When the 2024 NBA Finals between the Boston Celtics and Dallas Mavericks begin on Thursday night, ABC/ESPN’s Doris Burke will be making history of her own.
Burke, who was named to the lead NBA broadcasting crew for ABC/ESPN ahead of the 2023–24 season, is officially the first woman to call any major men’s championship in the United States in history.
The long-time reporter will join Mike Breen and J.J. Reddick courtside for the game as they’ve done throughout the entire NBA season.
Burke is set to work all of the NBA Finals games this season as ABC is the primary broadcaster for the games.
Tonight, Doris Burke is set to make history as the first woman to call any major U.S. men’s championship on TV. pic.twitter.com/jR7ujRJgq0
This isn’t the first time Burke’s name will be written in the history books. One of her other significant career moments came in 2017 when she was named a regular NBA game analyst for ESPN, making her the first woman to hold this position for a full season. She called the NBA Finals for ESPN Radio back in 2020, making her the first woman to do so.
James Cameron's Titanic came out in theaters on December 19, 1997. It made billions of dollars at the box office. It was released on VHS in September 1998 and DVD in August 1999. For nearly three decades it's been one of the most enduring pieces of popular culture, based on one of the most famous events in history. For 26 years it's been referenced, parodied, celebrated and rewatched. It's hard to believe there's a way to talk about this movie that hasn't already been covered.
And yet Joe Buck may have done it.
On Friday afternoon Buck was watching Titanic, as most people are wont to do. Near the end of the film, while Buck sat in a chair next to his neatly made bed, the former longtime voice of the World Series and current voice of ESPN's Monday Night Football, posted a video to his X / Twitter account pointing out a continuity error.
It turns out Buck really doesn't like how James Cameron sunk that boat and he could no longer keep it inside. So he made a video explaining his issues with the way this famous scene was shot. He did this while recording his television from across the room. Buck is completely off camera. Except for his feet.
Here’s an opportunity twitter - sorry, X - to tell me again that I’m stupid. Please, I’m begging you pic.twitter.com/z1iMP7Ck9J
"This shot doesn't make any sense," Buck says. "It's going in and now it's flat? Now you see the back of the ship. Going... There's no continuity there. This thing is going in nose down. The Titanic piece that is written there—hould be up in the air. Going in. This way. Instead all of a sudden it goes this way? What? It's always bothered me. One more time. It's going in vertically. K? The back of the ship's in the air. So if you're going to have the writing of the Titanic—it can't be that way! Now it's flat into the water? Now watch, it's going to be flat again... with the back. No! That would have been pointed up the other way. It would have been pointed away. Terrible."
We are not here to litigate the movie Titanic, which made $2.2 billion dollars in theaters on a budget of $200 million and was the highest grossing movie of all-time until Cameron released Avatar more than a decade later.
What we are here to litigate is the gratuitous shots of Joe Buck's feet in this video. Do you know how distracting something has to be to take people's eyes of Kate and Leo here? His toes have more screen time than Bill Paxton. If you were ever looking for an argument against vertical video, this is it.
Football season can't come soon enough. We need Buck and his bare feet grinding game tape, not crushing plot holes.
If the over/under on the number of betting scandals it would take a professional sports league to reexamine its gambling ties was set at 1.5, the under would have hit.
Following the lifetime ban of Toronto Raptors forward Jontay Porter, the NBA is in discussions with sportsbook partners to figure out some changes that might prevent another scandal.
According to ESPN, the NBA is looking for ways to tweak betting menus including, "prohibiting betting on players on two-way contracts between the G League and the NBA," and "not allowing bets on the 'under' on a player prop."
However, there are concerns that limiting what consumers can gamble on might push them back into the arms of unregulated sportsbooks. For example, the kind of off-the-books bookie that took the action of Shohei Ohtani's translator, Ippei Mizuhara.
Legalized sports gambling has been spreading rapidly since the Supreme Court struck down the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act 2018. While 38 states (plus the District of Colombia) have legalized gambling, there are still plenty of states dragging their feet to get involved. Possibly because there are so many kinks to work out where it is legal.
In the meantime, leagues are desperate to find ways to keep something like the Porter situation from happening again because there's so much money at stake. Where once we were inundated with daily fantasy sports ads, we're now subject to nonstop legal gambling ads. Sportsbooks advertise everywhere and there's a huge push to make gambling more accessible everywhere. It's where all the money is right now, and it's new and exciting and everyone wants to be involved and no one wants to miss out.
Things like the Porter scandal put it all at risk. That's why leagues have to do whatever they can to make sure it doesn't happen again. Even if they know deep down it probably will.
ESPN's public relations department issued a statement on Saturday afternoon denying a report that Milwaukee Bucks guard Patrick Beverley was banned from network programming.
The report, which came from Michael McCarthy of Front Office Sports Friday, indicated that Beverley had been banned from appearing on any ESPN shows after the Bucks guard ejected network producer Malinda Adams from his postgame media availability on Thursday night.
"There was an erroneous report that suggested Patrick Beverley was banned from appearing on ESPN. He isn't banned and never was," the statement from the network said Saturday.
Beverley's verbal altercation with Adams came after she admitted to the Bucks guard that she did not subscribe to his podcast.
Beverley's behavior during the media scrum, as well as during the game when he threw a ball at a group of Pacers fans behind the Milwaukee bench twice, was widely criticized in the aftermath of Milwaukee's elimination from the playoffs.
Beverley apologized to Adams on Friday, she said in a post on X (formerly Twitter) Friday.
There is no word yet on any discipline for Beverley from the NBA regarding either of the two incidents.
