The NBA is heavily in bed with State Farm, which if you’ve watched any NBA telecasts you already knew.
The ads are inescapable, and State Farm is even a presenting sponsor for things like tonight’s draft. Going a step further than usual towards shamelessness: the “pick is in” sound tonight at the Barclays Center will be the State Farm jingle sound.
You know the one.
During the #NBADraft, the "pick is in" bell sound inside the arena will be the @StateFarm jingle 🔔 pic.twitter.com/g3ytWPHp0A
— Sports Business Journal (@SBJ) June 23, 2022
This is a logical outcome in a world where we have commercials in NBA 2K games now, but it’s just another slow bit of inevitable corporate creep into spaces that didn’t have it before. (And even if it’s just an in-arena sound effect, it will absolutely make it to the broadcast.)
Does it matter? No. Not really. This is just one person whining about something impossibly stupid happening within another event that, in itself, is pretty silly from a production standpoint. The draft could be a series of emails.
Even “watching” it is pretty unnecessary and certainly inefficient; Woj and Shams will be multiple picks ahead of the broadcast all night, including trades and other transactions that the panel of experts on ESPN seemingly won’t have knowledge of for way too long after the fact. Woj basically outlined the top of the draft earlier today already anyway:
As team boards finalize today, the 1-2-3 of the NBA Draft is increasingly firm, per sources: Jabari Smith to Orlando, Chet Holmgren to Oklahoma City and Paolo Banchero to Houston.
— Adrian Wojnarowski (@wojespn) June 23, 2022
But, even with all of that knowledge, we can still point out that this is a very dumb thing that benefits no one.
