Brian Scalabrine NBC Sports Boston NBA Screen grab: NBC Sports Boston

On Wednesday November 6th, America was left to try to make sense of a Presidential Election which saw Donald Trump return to the White House after an overwhelming victory over Kamala Harris that saw him sweep every battleground state amidst a red wave nationally. But nobody tried quite like Brian Scalabrine.

The current Boston Celtics analyst was paired with longtime basketball writer Frank Isola on SiriusXM NBA Radio on the morning after the Presidential Election. Naturally, that led to some casual conversation between the pair about tuning into the election coverage on Tuesday night since the NBA had the night off to encourage their fans to get out and vote. And the two clearly had some fun with playing the part of election analysts with some.

Both Scalabrine and Isola claimed that the election coverage was too complicated to follow with all the races for President, Senate, and the House of Representatives.

“I enjoyed a little bit of the coverage and I got lost in about 30 minutes, I’m like, ‘I don’t know what’s going on,” Scalabrine said.

“I know,” Isola responded. “In your own mind you think, ‘I can keep up with this.’ And then it gets really confusing talking about the Senate and the House and then this race happening in this state and it’s like enough already.”

Then the pair started asking about the total votes with Isola asking if the popular was a “big thing.” Although it has no bearing on who is elected as president thanks to the Electoral College, Trump is well on track to be the first Republican to win the popular vote since George W. Bush in 2004.

In the midst of trying to figure out what exactly was going on with the popular vote, Scalabrine dropped this mind-blowing piece of speculation. “You gotta remember, I think when they call a state, I don’t think they keep counting. You know what I mean by that? So if states are closer I think they keep going. I don’t think that they count 1, 2, 177,477, 78, I don’t think it’s like that. I think once they know they just call it. Done.”

Isola responded by saying, “I guess.”

In case anyone thinks this was serious and not a bit of joking around the morning after the election, this is not how any state, city, township, or precinct counts votes or decides elections. (At least in America at the moment.) Even though networks may call races early due to the tabulated votes and extensive data and projections at their disposal, indeed every vote is counted in American elections. And just so we are crystal clear, television networks calling races do not get to decide who wins real life elections or when votes stop counting.

But later in the program Scalabrine went back to the idea. As he and Isola were talking about turnout being well down in this year’s election versus the 2020 contest, Scalabrine reasoned that it must have been because the race had already been decided and people around the country just collectively decided to pack it in and call it a day. Scalabrine also joked that the NBA’s t-shirts encouraging people to vote must not have worked.

“If you go and look at the battleground states, which Biden won most of those, all of them were really close. So I think that they had to count all the way to the last one. Look at the race in Georgia, it was like a 10,000 vote difference back then. So my point of that is more people might have voted, I think this is how it works, but they just stopped counting because it’s like Trump won, done.”

Move over Steve Kornacki, Brian Scalabrine is coming for you in 2028!

Adam Silver, if you are reading this, maybe it’s a good idea to schedule some NBA games on Election Night four years from now.