NBC Sports Philadelphia is budgeting to add a courtside voice to its Sixers broadcasts ahead of LeBron James’s arrival this season, network vice president of content Alexandra Matcham told the Philadelphia Inquirer.
“I think you need a voice on the court where Alaa [Abdelnaby] and Kate [Scott] can’t be to give us insight, do pre- and postgame interviews, analysis, all of that,” Matcham said. “It’s a very hard job to do.”
For years, NBC Sports Philadelphia and its predecessor, Comcast SportsNet, used reporters like Serena Winters and Taryn Hatcher to fill that kind of role for the Sixers. That stopped in 2020, when the network began eliminating in-arena and in-game reporting jobs across its properties as basketball and hockey seasons wrapped that year, according to Crossing Broad’s Kevin Kinkead. Hatcher stayed on covering the Phillies for five more seasons after that before her contract lapsed at the end of 2025 and NBC Sports Philadelphia cut the position rather than renew it. Kinkead later reported that the network and Hatcher had discussed a freelance arrangement that would have let her take on other work at the same time, but the talks ended without an agreement over what Kinkead’s sources described as a standard contract disagreement, not any real conflict between the two sides.
That left NBC Sports Philadelphia without anyone in that role for the Sixers’ 2025-26 season, and the roster now taking shape gives the network far less room to go another year without one.
“If you get a generational talent on your team, it could easily become a situation where the people that work for us are burnt out by December, and you don’t want that,” Matcham said. “You need extra help.”
The shape of the new role hasn’t been decided, and Matcham said she’s been deliberate about not defaulting to the title NBC Sports Philadelphia has used for that kind of position in the past. The network cut its last remaining in-arena reporting jobs across its properties, including the Sixers, starting in 2020, and whatever gets added back now won’t simply be a return to that old model.
“As I’m talking to my colleagues, I’m not even calling it a reporter role because I feel like it’s going to give them a stereotype I don’t necessarily mean,” Matcham said.
Among the options Matcham described is bypassing a generalist Sixers reporter altogether in favor of someone hired specifically for James’s orbit, someone with an existing relationship built from prior coverage of him rather than of the team broadly.
The Scott-Abdelnaby broadcast finished 29th out of 30 teams in AA’s 2025-26 local NBA announcer rankings, the third straight season in that spot. The most common grade fans gave them was a C, and roughly six in ten voters gave them a passing grade at all. Several comments also cited the absence of Hatcher as a drag on the broadcast.
Hatcher spent eight years at NBC Sports Philadelphia covering all four major Philadelphia teams, most recently working Phillies home games alongside Tom McCarthy and John Kruk, but since her departure has been selective about new roles while managing a health situation. Matcham defended the decision at the time, telling the Philadelphia Business Journal the network wanted “to add to our storytelling in new ways” and that the position was being eliminated.
Whatever title the network settles on, it will be trying to recreate, under different terms, the exact kind of presence it decided a year ago it could do without.
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.