Jalen Rose was expected to appear on Get Up Friday morning. Except, he never did.
It likely would’ve been attributed to technical difficulties in normal circumstances, but nothing about Friday was a normal day in Bristol, Connecticut.
Brian Custer, filling in for host Mike Greenberg, made multiple suggestions to the audience that Rose would be appearing on Get Up to discuss the NBA, prior to the start of free agency on Friday. Teams officially could start negotiating players beginning on Friday, June 30 at 6 p.m. ET. So, Rose’s expected appearance made sense considering the circumstances.
The problem? Rose never made that scheduled appearance. And Custer attributed it to his dealing with audio issues in Los Angeles. In any other instance, it would’ve been a perfectly normal assertion. But right after Rose’s sudden audio issues, Andrew Marchand of The New York Post reported that ESPN’s latest round of layoffs was expected to impact around 20 on-air figures. Ironically, Nick Friedell was in studio for Get Up on Friday morning and was also laid off later in the day.
https://twitter.com/awfulannouncing/status/1674922144931758082?s=20
We now know that Friday’s layoffs included Rose, as Marchand and Ryan Glasspiegel of The New York Post reported that the studio analyst was among ESPN’s layoffs, just over an hour after he was expected to appear on Get Up.
NEWS: ESPN has let go NBA Countdown analyst Jalen Rose, The Post has learned.https://t.co/WuZyLB0TIo
— Andrew Marchand (@AndrewMarchand) June 30, 2023
Rose had worked at ESPN since 2007 in some form. First as a college basketball game and studio analyst and as an NBA analyst for platforms including SportsCenter, then as the co-host of the Jalen and Jacoby TV show/radio show/podcast with David Jacoby from 2011-2022, as an NBA Countdown analyst since 2012, as a launch host of Get Up in 2018, and as a regular figure on other ESPN studio programming over the last decade-plus.
This does come after a reduction in what Rose was doing for ESPN, though. Notably, Jalen and Jacoby ended with Jacoby’s departure from the company after 23 years last December. ESPN initially planned to launch a separate podcast with Rose after that, but he actually wound up partnering with the Post for one.
It’s unfortunate that this happened to Rose, and it’s not a particularly great look for ESPN. As we’ve come to learn, most of the ESPN employees that were let go Friday were not informed until the morning of. That appears to be the case with Rose, which would make his absence more than just due to “audio issues.”
[Awful Announcing on Twitter, New York Post]
