Doris Burke has been dropped from ESPN's top NBA broadcasting trio, according to a report from Andrew Marchand of The Athletic. Burke has been working in broadcasting since 1990, and has been at ESPN since 1991, working men's and women's college basketball, doing radio broadcasts, doing sideline reporting, and eventually making her way into the booth as a game analyst. She worked the Finals in 2024, in a trio with Mike Breen and JJ Redick, and she worked the 2025 Finals with Breen and Richard Jefferson. The trio with Redick was fine, if generally bland and joyless; the trio with Jefferson was a mess. Intent upon fixing things and faced with a choice between Burke and Jefferson, ESPN stuck to its recent and extremely dubious formula and chose the more recent ex-player, bumping Burke down at least one peg.
Change almost had to come. ESPN's coverage of the 2025 NBA playoffs was pretty bad, and eventually became its own talking point. The network's top broadcasting trio, in particular, never developed a groove. Jefferson and Burke couldn't sort out their roles: Jefferson seemed to step forward as the trio's primary analyst, despite not always or even often being up to the demands of the gig; Burke, who made her name as a sharp and uncommonly informed analyst of Xs-and-Os stuff, was left to supply colorful descriptions of slow-motion replays, which she managed largely by repeating the words "intangible" and "basketball IQ."
Very often the two would talk over one another. Other times, they would both go silent, as if each was waiting for the other to make a point. Poor Mike Breen, who has a great voice and the boundless enthusiasm of a Labrador retriever, wound up doing way too much talking. The chemistry sucked.
By the end of the Finals, long and important stretches of action would go by without Burke making any contributions whatsoever. This was a bummer, because she has been good at this job in the past. Breen would be feverishly tap-dancing, or Jefferson would be saying some inane stuff like And as a basketball player, Mike, I can tell you, you have just got to make the basketball go into the hoop, and then Burke would speak up, but she would use the moment to say, with tremendous gravity, I have really admired the determination and basketball IQ of Isaiah Hartenstein. The effect was like the opening of a drogue parachute, a sudden and almost violent disruption of whatever desperate momentum the broadcast had otherwise conjured. There would be 18 seconds of silence, and then Breen would valiantly heave himself once more unto the breach.
I don't think Burke is really to blame for any of this. ESPN's calculations seem screwy: It was a weird idea when the network put a solid analyst like Burke into a booth with another solid analyst in Redick, and an even worse idea to saddle her with Jefferson, who largely stinks in any role. The makeup of these teams didn't leave her a lot of room to open up, to delight in details, and to riff on the action on the court. Deprived of oxygen, she often lapsed into clichés, giving the impression of general disengagement.
Because there is evidence from her past that she can be good at this job, it would've made sense to keep Burke in the top booth and bounce Jefferson, a relative youth, back to the minors. I take as evidence that this week's maneuver does not reflect an overhaul of ESPN's process that the network reportedly will replace Burke with Tim Legler, another earnest Xs-and-Os analyst who will have to work out a my-turn-your-turn type of deal with Jefferson.
It's an inherently silly gig. You can earn regard because you are authentically good at talking on television, or you can earn regard because everyone else in your field is a bozo. Hubie Brown, universally beloved as one of the very best to ever do it, is one of the most easily mocked orators in the history of televised sports. Personally, by the third game of the 2025 NBA Finals, I was complaining with absolute sincerity in a Defector Slack channel that Reggie Miller—for the better part of 20 years a squawking, anti-charismatic metonym for broadcasting ineptitude—should've been on the call. I muted long sections of the last handful of games, affirming that commentary isn't so crucial an ingredient of my enjoyment of televised sports.
It's hard to get very worked up about the dissolution, in whatever form, of a broadcasting trio that made the experience of watching a great series of games actively worse, and occasionally painful. I would be pumping my fist today if the network had demoted Jefferson. The fact of it having replaced an analyst with an analyst in a broadcast trio choked by too many analysts means I am not feeling very optimistic about the 2026 Finals.
Burke has not been fired. Marchand reports that she and ESPN are discussing an extension of a contract that expires after the upcoming season, and that she may yet land on ESPN's No. 2 team. To me this would be fine: I have enjoyed Burke's work when she has been good, and I have dreaded the sound of her voice when she's been bad, and I am prepared to accept anything that gets her away from Jefferson and into a booth where she can do the stuff she's good at, without fighting for space. And I have learned that it's not so bad to mute the Finals. I expect there'll be plenty more of that in my future.
