NBC is five months into its return to the NBA after a 23-year absence, and by most metrics, the comeback has worked.
Opening Night drew 5.61 million viewers, the best tipoff audience in 15 years. Sunday Night Basketball launched on Feb. 1, following Sunday Night Football, and has been one of the season’s better-performing NBA windows. The Peacock-exclusive Monday night games have found an audience that didn’t exist for the NBA on streaming a year ago. The network has done what it set out to do.
What it hasn’t fully done yet is replace SportsCenter as the cultural reflex, as the place players think of when they think of highlights, visibility, and the proof that a good game actually happened in the broader sports conversation. That’s a 40-year hole to fill, and five months isn’t enough time to fill it.
Monday night, Derrick Jones Jr. made that point without meaning to.
The Clippers had just beaten the Knicks in a Peacock-exclusive broadcast, and Jones stuck around for a quick postgame interview with NBC’s studio team of Ahmed Fareed, Brian Scalabrine, and Chris Bosh.
Jones had played well in the Clippers’ 126-118 win over the Knicks — he recorded 16 points on 6-of-14 shooting with four three-pointers, seven rebounds, three steals, and two blocks — and was in a good mood, talking about reading defenses, finding space when teams overhelp.
Then, he mentioned that when he gets downhill and takes off, he wants to make sure he gets on SportsCenter.
“Don’t worry about SportsCenter,” Farred chimed in from NBC’s Stamford studios. “It’s still an OK show. But don’t worry about SporteCenter. Peacock’s got great highlight shows. NBCSports.com. You’ll be all over it.”
NBC taking shots at a competitor lol
“Don’t worry about sportscenter. Still an okay show. Peacock’s got great highlight shows” pic.twitter.com/Uj3H2zICZg
— Oh No He Didn’t (@ohnohedidnt24) March 10, 2026
It wasn’t a shot at ESPN, as much as it was Fareed — who has been carrying NBC’s NBA identity more than almost anyone else on the roster this season, hosting Peacock Monday coverage, anchoring All-Star Weekend, recently adding MLB studio duties to a schedule that was already full — making the case that the highlights have somewhere to live besides Bristol.
He is, at this point, the connective tissue of NBC Sports’ entire live sports operation, the person the network has entrusted more than anyone else to make the case, night after night from a desk in Stamford, that there’s somewhere else worth watching.
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.