A few hundred feet from the door to Oracle Arena sat a cluster of air-conditioned production trucks, ringed by a fence and protected by tight security. This was the ESPN compound for Game 4 of the 2019 NBA Finals between the Toronto Raptors and the Golden State Warriors. The same set-up will be used for Game 6.
The compound—as ESPN staffers call it—buzzed with activity. ABC holds the broadcast rights to the NBA Finals, and both ABC and ESPN are owned by the same parent company: Walt Disney. The ESPN team has manages much of what ultimately appears on TV screens in the U.S. during the series, combining game film with crowd reactions, celebrity fan sightings, background stories on athletes, and B-roll footage.
“It’s definitely different [than a regular season game] because when you get to this level, there’s so much more at stake in these games and for us from a production/technology/business standpoint,” said Tim Corrigan, senior coordinating producer for NBA on ESPN. “Everything is just on a much higher level as there’s a lot more at stake.”
The ESPN compound comprises nine trucks managing different shows and aspects of the live production. One truck controls live production capabilities and graphics, while another is focused on replay, another for audio and video, a fourth for managing technology, and two studio trucks that operate the ESPN shows NBA Countdown and NBA: The Jump.
Within the compound there is also a truck managing world feeds, an NBA-TV truck, and another from TSN, the Canadian rights holder of the NBA Finals. TSN announced on Monday that it had set a new Canadian record for an NBA game during the Raptors’ Game 4 win, with an average audience of 4.631 million. The game was also Canada’s highest-ranked sports broadcast of 2019. ESPN has yet to release ratings for the NBA Finals.
Weaving all of this together are 14.2 miles of cable at the Oakland, Calif., location, versus 12 miles in Toronto.
Spending just a few minutes inside the main production truck quickly gives some sort of impression of the scale of such a production. More than 100 ESPN staffers flood through the interior and around the exterior of Oracle Arena in one of the final games ever to be played there. Next season after nearly 50 years in Oakland, the Warriors will shift to their new arena in San Francisco, Chase Center.
“There’s so much integration and synergy that goes in that puts this in place. It’s an adrenaline rush when you’re actually doing it because everything is live and it’s so unpredictable in terms of what’s going to happen next,” Corrigan said.
He pointed to Game 5 in Toronto as an example. Raptors forward Kawhi Leonard had an incredible run in the fourth quarter of that game in front of a sold-out crowd at Scotiabank Arena, scoring 10 of his 26 points in the final minutes to erase Golden State’s double-digit lead.
“Once Kawhi Leonard went on that run it seemed like this was going to be Toronto closing it out and winning their first final in the franchise’s 24-year history,” Corrigan said.
The Warriors skirted elimination with a 106-105 victory, despite a season-ending injury to star forward Kevin Durant. That has brought the series back to Oakland for Game 6. Thursday night’s game will be the final NBA contest to ever take place at Oracle Arena.
“Anytime you’re involved with producing a championship at this level, that alone comes with the excitement and the responsibility,” Corrigan said. “The ebb and flow of these games is just incredible.”
As the series has progressed, so too has ESPN’s production style and capability. The sports network has attempted to tweak its tactics based on the equipment available and the storylines produced. ESPN uses 45 cameras for these broadcasts, including 18 super slow-mo cameras and one super slow-mo sky cam. One of those slow-mo cameras captured a shot of Durant’s leg in a cast after his achilles injury. “Pretty dramatic,” Corrigan said.
Outside of the buzzing Scotiabank Arena during Game 5, ESPN also wanted to capture the intensity of the roughly 25,000 fans in the streets of Toronto. Since the network didn’t have aerial production capabilities, such as drones, planes or blimps, on site, it had to get creative to offer that perspective. So it installed a camera on a 40-foot jib arm.
“That can really help bring to life when you say ‘It’s an absolute mad house here in Toronto,’” Corrigan said. “The hope is that if we go back for Game 7, we will have a cable camera to accentuate that even more to tell a bigger part of the story.”
Further adding to the context are customized data feeds of official league data provided by Second Spectrum, 15 robotic cameras that follow the fast-moving gameplay on the court, virtual lenses for second-screen productions, two megawatts of redundant/load sharing generator power, 22 outbound transmission paths, 13 inbound transmission paths, and 10 gigabytes of data service.
As the NBA Finals come to a close—either Thursday evening in Oakland, or Sunday in Toronto—the NBA production team at ESPN will soon shift its focus to the next big thing: the 2019 NBA Summer League. There, ESPN plans to experiment with new tactics and technologies that it might then be able to implement next season using real players but without the intense pressure of a live championship game. Those experiments might include new cameras or sky cam flight patterns.
“Whether it’s the NBA, NFL, MLB, NHL, or top other sport categories, soccer, tennis, college sports, we’re all looking for the next thing,” Corrigan said. “It’s hard to find the next yellow line in football. We’re all looking for it, but while we’re looking for it we have to keep improving what we do have.”
“Things are moving so quickly now, you just never know what’s going to be next.”