ESPN stuck with First Take this morning as the FBI announced NBA gambling indictments

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https://www.mediaite.com/media/espn-...s-air-it-live/

Portland Trail Blazers coach Chauncey Billups and Miami Heat guard Terry Rozier’s arrests this morning shocked the sports world, prompting the major cable news networks to cover FBI Director Kash Patel’s news conference live. “But if one were to pop on ESPN in the 10 a.m. hour, you’d find Stephen A. Smith and his panel discussing the NFL like it was any other day,” says Mediaite’s Zachary Leeman. “Smith did address the news following the press conference and argued on First Take that it is part of a larger revenge plan by President Donald Trump that he suggested could affect other sports leagues. Pundits were floored by the fact that ESPN was not carrying the press conference. ESPN is financially involved with sports betting companies and has its own sportsbook.” ALSO: First Take desperately missed a full-time host amid NBA betting scandal news.

ESPN unsubtly removed an ESPN BET promo during Get Up as it tackled the FBI’s NBA gambling arrests

A chyron promoting ESPN’s gambling brand was removed from Get Up’s chyron in the middle of a discussion on the arrests of Portland Trail Blazers head coach Chauncey Billups and active Miami Heat guard Terry Rozier. “If ESPN leadership was hoping no one would notice the promo quite literally disappearing mid-broadcast while watching the show (or that no one would record it and aggregate it for the internet), well, that’s a little naive, isn’t it?” says USA Today’s Robert Zeglinski. “Someone tell the good folks at ESPN that once something like that makes it to air, it’s going to be near impossible to simply scrub after the fact. People pay attention! Their eyes wouldn’t lie to them! If the network wanted to avoid looking uncouth amid a massive criminal scandal, it would’ve updated its regular broadcast screen before going live.”

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ESPN dropped the ball on NBA’s breaking news

ESPN showed its ass. And unfortunately, this full moon is never going away.



By Drew Lerner on 10/24/2025

Early Thursday morning, news broke that Portland Trail Blazers head coach Chauncey Billups and Miami Heat guard Terry Rozier were arrested in connection with separate FBI gambling probes. Hours later, FBI Director Kash Patel held a news conference outlining the cases, which allege that Rozier intentionally removed himself from a March 2023 game due to injury after a suspicious number of wagers were placed on “under” props for his various stats. After the bets cashed, Rozier received $200k at his home.

As for Billups, the FBI alleges the Portland coach is involved in rigged underground poker games backed by the Bonanno, Gambino, and Genovese crime families.

Unsurprisingly, the bombshell allegations dominated headlines throughout Thursday morning. Billups had just been coaching the Trail Blazers the night before his arrest. Rozier is set to rake in over $20 million this year from his contract with the Heat. The NBA has suspended both indefinitely.

In another era, ESPN, the Worldwide Leader in sports, would’ve spent all day with wall-to-wall coverage of the scandal. Frankly, the story deserves such coverage. Yesterday, that was nowhere to be found.

ESPN’s typical daytime lineup of Get Up, First Take, and The Pat McAfee Show went forward without preemption. And how each program handled the day’s top story says a lot about ESPN’s ability to cover breaking news such as this in 2025.

With the initial news breaking around 7:30 a.m. ET, Get Up was understandably left scrambling to cover the story, but didn’t touch it until almost 8:40 a.m., when host Mike Greenberg gave a short readout of the circumstances. Greenberg again gave a short readout of the news at the top of the hour, but Get Up did not do a full segment on the story until about 9:20 a.m.

Even then, Greenberg had to acknowledge the irony that he was discussing the story next to Will Compton and Taylor Lewan of Bussin’ with the Boys fame, both of whom are known for discussing gambling on their show. An ESPN graphics producer must’ve also noticed the irony, because an ESPN Bet ad was promptly removed from the screen when Greeny began the segment.

But ESPN’s gambling interests aside, how the network covered the first several hours of this developing story is a complete indictment of its ability to produce meaningful breaking news coverage. Not only was the story afforded just one full segment during the show (for context, Aaron Rodgers’ revenge game against the Green Bay Packers received multiple segments), but the folks discussing it were grossly unprepared.

Alongside the Bussin’ crew was NFL analyst Dan Orlovsky and NFL insider Adam Schefter. Get Up couldn’t even get an NBA reporter on there, much less someone who could’ve provided actual insight about the case.

But let’s extend a bit of grace. This story broke minutes before Get Up went on air. First Take, on the other hand, had several hours to prepare. And how Stephen A. Smith’s gang handled themselves made Get Up look Emmy-worthy.

At 10 a.m., right when First Take begins, the FBI held a press conference to discuss the multiple gambling probes that ensnared both Billups and Rozier. CNN aired it live. Fox News aired it live. MSNBC aired it live. ESPN did not.

Again, we’re not only talking about the biggest story of the day in sports. We’re talking about one of the biggest news stories of the day period. Inexplicably, First Take opted to go forward with pre-planned segments about Victor Wembanyama and the Spurs, then Aaron Rodgers and the Steelers, before getting to the FBI’s arrests at 10:30.

At that point, Smith explained the story, aired a few clips from Patel’s press conference, then brought on NBA insider Shams Charania, who did his best to cosplay as a legal analyst despite having no such background.

It didn’t take long for Stephen A. to take the story into fantasy land from there. In a three-minute diatribe that seemed only tangentially related to the FBI probe, Smith took aim at the Trump administration, repeatedly saying “he’s coming” for professional sports leagues, seemingly because the NFL shut down his bid to purchase the Buffalo Bills in 2014.

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“How many times, for one incident after another, have I said, Trump is coming. He’s coming,” Smith began. “I’m gonna say it on national television again. Bad Bunny is performing at the Super Bowl, and all of a sudden, you’re hearing ICE is gonna be there looking to engage in mass deportations. The Super Bowl, disrupting things. Big night for the NBA; Wembanyama put on a show. That has now been smeared because we’re talking about this story. Remember, Trump has a long, long history connected to the world of sports because he had those casinos.”

“Anybody that has been around him. Anybody that has talked to him. Anybody that has seen his reactions from the sports leagues and the positions that people have taken, they are not surprised at what’s going on today,” Smith continued. “It’s a statement and it’s a warning that more is coming. And that’s what they’re saying here. I’m just telling you, it’s as serious as it gets. This ain’t the platform for me to get into it the way I’m going to get into it. But I’ve been saying, he’s coming. He’s coming.”

Now, to be clear, there’s a definite political angle to this story that shouldn’t be discounted. But this is hour three of a developing situation in which viewers are likely confused about what exactly is happening, especially considering ESPN itself had very limited coverage of the story to that point. There will be a time and place to talk about the politics of it all, but there are several other more pressing storylines to cover.

First, what exactly is going to happen next with Billups and Rozier from a legal standpoint? Second, what does this mean for the Trail Blazers and the Heat, who are now without a head coach and a player? Third, how does the NBA respond? The league had already cleared Rozier in a prior investigation, and hadn’t yet announced its suspensions when First Take was on the air. Fourth, what are the larger implications of this investigation regarding pro sports’ embrace of legalized gambling?

At best, the political angle is probably the fifth most important story for a sports outlet to cover. And even then, you’d prefer someone with some level of expertise in federal investigations to give that opinion, not Stephen A. Smith.

But alas, this was all ESPN had. It’s a far cry from the network’s heyday, when they could call on Bob Ley or the like to anchor a special edition of SportsCenter with wall-to-wall coverage of the story. Instead, ESPN viewers were treated to the political ramblings of Stephen A. Smith and a panel of hot-take artists wholly unprepared to discuss a story of this kind.

Yesterday would’ve been a perfect time for ESPN to lean on its sister network, ABC, and bring on a legal analyst from ABC News to parse through the minutiae of a case like this. That happened, eventually, in the 3 p.m. hour, after every cable news network had already ran laps around the story throughout the day.

ESPN might’ve been better off simply cutting to an ABC News special report about the story during its morning programming if the network didn’t have a breaking news team ready to handle coverage. That’s not as unprecedented as it might seem. FS1 preempted its studio programming during the Kansas City Chiefs parade shooting in 2024 to simulcast Fox News coverage of the event. News divisions have the resources, personnel, and expertise to cover an FBI probe that sports channels simply do not in today’s day and age.

(Side note: Let’s not let FS1 off the hook here, either. That network was airing a rerun of Wake Up Barstool during the 10 a.m. hour.)

ESPN’s coverage didn’t start to mirror the importance of this story until 2 p.m., when SportsCenter came on and interviewed ESPN NBA reporter Tim Bontemps, who, by the way, attended the FBI press conference Thursday morning. Was he not available to remote in for First Take?

And for those wondering what the post-First Take coverage looked like, A.J. Hawk was running point for ESPN from 12-2 p.m. as a fill-in host for The Pat McAfee Show. If anyone wants a quick laugh, go check out how that coverage went.

Suffice it to say, the days of ESPN having the infrastructure to properly cover a breaking news story like this are long gone. The death by a thousand cuts that has happened to the network’s news division over the years in favor of investments in opinion programming came to bear yesterday. No one was ready to step in. The shows didn’t know how to handle a story so complex in nature. And viewers tuning in to learn about what the hell was happening and why the FBI arrested two active NBA figures were left with more questions than answers.

ESPN showed its ass. And unfortunately, this full moon is never going away.