Former bane of my existence Doc Rivers just found a new hobby to fill his time while collecting nemployment from the Sixers. It is being announced that Doc Rivers and Doris Burke will be joining ESPN’s primary team for NBA coverage. Rivers will join Mike Breen in the booth, while Burke becomes the company’s lead NBA analyst. This will also leave no spot for Mark Jackson, who is supposedly being demoted in this process.
Both of these hires are bad on their own. Together, they will be the Kobe and Shaq of delivering biased NBA calls. Doc Rivers is going to be really salty about not finding a head coaching gig. Rivers was embarrassed to be let go from the Sixers. then, he was all in on the Suns’ job. The man who has frequently compared himself to Gregg Popovich will definitely let this emotion show when making a call on a lob from Bradley Beal to Kevin Durant.
Burke is going to be no better. Her public awareness skyrocketed after becoming the person to speak before every game of NBA2k. Since then, she has called many NBA games to mixed results. Those mixed results are annoying, uneducated takes, to utter silence. Her biggest comparison to Doc Rivers is that they both stopped doing their job with four minutes left in the Sixers’ game six against the Celtics.
I don’t know if anyone other than Doris Burke is happy about this. Rivers is surely only doing this to convince the world that he isn’t sulking about not coaching an NBA team this year. Neither of them are going to add anything to the booth. The least they can do, is stay out of the way every time Breen tries to say, “Bang.” That’s the best part of basketball, and Doc Rivers has already removed too much of my enjoyment from the sport.
