Blake Griffin on Ja Morant Credit: NBA on Prime
By Sam Neumann on

Blake Griffin’s first season in sports media has largely delivered on what he promised before the cameras turned on. He had been open, before the season started, about what he wanted the job to look like, less hot-take theater — more of what the best NFL analysts do — which is help people who weren’t in the room understand what it actually felt like to be in the room.

On Carmelo Anthony’s podcast last January, he talked about the disconnect between NBA fans and NBA players and said he thought he could help close it. He has spent most of this season doing exactly that.

The Ja Morant moment was the clearest example. After a Grizzlies loss in early November where Morant sleepwalked through most of the game, Griffin said plainly that for a player making $40 million a year who needs to be his team’s leader, the effort level wasn’t good enough. Here was a former player using his credibility to say something true that needed to be said.

The clip made the rounds because it was refreshing, which is not a word that gets used often enough to describe NBA studio analysis.

So when Griffin made an appearance on Up & Adams this week, and Kay Adams asked him why the transition to television seemed to come so easily, his answer was worth paying attention to. The short version is that it didn’t — not at first — and what changed was letting go of the idea that it had to.

“Authenticity is just the name of the game,” Griffin said. “As long as you’re authentic and you’re thoughtful and you’re prepared — something can go wrong, something can go right, you could be wrong about your prediction, but as long as I feel like I know what I’m talking about, I really just try to be myself.”

He also talked about the learning curve in more specific terms than most former athletes are willing to. Early in the season, he said, he was so focused on not making mistakes that the mistakes felt catastrophic when they happened. There was one broadcast where he tried to say “versatile” but couldn’t get the word out, landing on “versatility” instead, then stopped to acknowledge it on air. “Versatility,” he repeated. “That’s the word.” He laughed about it in the Adams interview, but the point he was making was that addressing the moment rather than freezing through it turned out to be the right instinct, and not just for him personally.

That instinct is part of what has made Amazon’s studio show work. The criticism going into the season was that putting a group of former players with limited broadcasting experience — Griffin alongside Dirk Nowitzki, Steve Nash, and Udonis Haslem, hosted by Taylor Rooks — was a leap of faith that might not pay off. Amazon’s debut broadcast in October quieted most of that skepticism pretty quickly. The LED court technology helped, but the analysts were loose and specific in ways that studio shows usually take a full season to find. Griffin, in particular, came across as someone who had been paying attention to this industry for a long time and had a clear idea of what he wanted to do in it.

“You watch so many of these shows,” Griffin told Adams. “Football, basketball, baseball. You always kind of think, ‘Oh, that was really good,’ or ‘ That wasn’t so good.’ I think even subconsciously over my career, I was just watching the people that I really thought did a good job.”

About Sam Neumann

Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.

View all posts by Sam Neumann