ROCKET LAUNCH?
Iconic Houston broadcaster hints at jarring changes to playoff presentation
May 29, 2020, 12:01 pm
Photo by Emilee Chinn/Getty Images.
Nothing is decided, and maybe won't be announced for weeks, but a pretty likely scenario has NBA teams holding training camp 2.0 starting next month in each home city, then everybody moving to Orlando for more practice and scrimmages, before concluding the regular season, and heading to a 16-team playoff format. Every game will be played without fans at Disney's ESPN Wide World of Sports complex. Teams will be re-seeded for the playoffs by their regular season record regardless of conference.
If the playoffs started today, the Houston Rockets (seeded 10th) would open against the Utah Jazz (seeded 7th).
How will this play with Rockets fans? More important, on what channel?
"The games will be played in hermetically sealed arenas at Disney, and Rockets games will air on AT&T SportsNet Southwest. I hope we can get back to playing games sometime in July. They will send a blank (silent) feed to us in our Houston studio, and the local broadcasters will call the game," said play-by-play man Bill Worrell, who amazingly is entering his fifth decade calling Rockets games on TV.
With the league in a quarantine bubble at Disney, teams will be allowed to bring only players, coaches, and a limited number of family members and staff. Not making the cut: TV and radio announcers, Clutch the Bear, Power Dancers, Red Rowdies and those guys scalping tickets outside Toyota Center.
"We will get to work some regular-season games (along with ESPN and TNT) and first round of the playoffs. It won't be as exciting without fans, but we are playing with the idea of piping in some crowd noise to keep you from hearing basketballs hit the court in an empty arena," Worrell said.
Piping in crowd noise also will keep viewers from hearing players letting fly with some pretty rough language. Either that, or there will be a seven-second delay with a designated bleep button pusher.
This won't be the first time that Worrell has announced games from hundreds, even thousands of miles of social distance.
"We did a couple of games played in China last trip, and the quality in our Houston studio was excellent. I have done remote telecasts on several occasions while working for Home Sports Entertainment (HSE), Fox Sports and AT&T SportsNet, especially for European tour golf matches and gymnastics events."
Fun facts about Worrell. He grew up in Houston, went to Lamar High School on Westheimer and graduated from the University of Houston, where he made the baseball team as a lefty pitcher. He was the sports anchor on Channel 2 from 1974 to 1980, when he joined ESPN and began announcing Rockets games for the Houston market. The most fun fact: his father "Dub" Worrell was the Rockets team dentist and is credited with convincing Houston pro athletes to wear mouthguards.
Announcing live sports events from a remote studio isn't Worrell's first choice, but it's not anything unusual in sports. The Tennis Channel often covers smaller European and Asian tournaments from its home base in Culver City, Calif. Yet somehow the announcers always make themselves available for Wimbledon in London and the French Open in Paris.
"Sweetening" the sound of sports broadcasts by adding fake crowd noise isn't a new trick, either. Pro wrestling regularly pipes in pre-recorded hoots and hollers, especially when an uncooperative crowd is jeering a good guy wrestler and cheering a villain. Wrestling fans, you can't trust 'em.
Adding fake crowd noise and announcing "live" games from distant studios harkens back to the beginning of sports broadcasting. In prehistoric days, before televised sports killed the radio star, baseball announcers "recreated" away games on radio without hitting the road themselves. Here's how they did it.
Home team announcers would sit in a studio and read bare bones reports from the away stadium, sent by a stats person over a teletype machine (think fax machine with bells and typewriter chatter). The reports would simply read, "Smith K" (for strikeout) or "Johnson FO left" (fly ball out to leftfield). It was left to the announcers to make games interesting by imagining out loud what was taking place on the field. A studio engineer would play crowd noise, recorded from a recent home game, raising or lowering the volume depending on whether the teletype indicated ground ball or home run. The sound of bat hitting baseball was recreated by striking a large pencil or toy bat against a wood block.
Creative announcers were so skilled at embellishing games from a simple scorecard that fans huddled around a radio in their living room couldn't tell the difference between home and road play-by-play.
Of course, Worrell and his AT&T SportsNet partners will have the advantage of watching a silent feed of Rockets games in real time. Or seven seconds later if the trash talking turns blue. We're looking at you, Russell Westbrook.
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Houston spent time this week practicing an inbound play that coach Kelvin Sampson thought his team might need against Purdue.
Milos Uzan, the third option, ran it to perfection.
He tossed the ball to Joseph Tugler, who threw a bounce pass right back to Uzan, and the 6-foot-4 guard soared to the rim for an uncontested layup with 0.9 seconds left, giving the top-seeded Cougars a 62-60 victory — and a matchup with second-seeded Tennessee in Sunday's Elite Eight.
“Great execution at a time we needed that,” said Sampson, who is a win away from making his third Final Four and his second with Houston in five years. “You never know when you’re going to need it.”
The Cougars (33-4) made only one other basket over the final eight minutes, wasted a 10-point lead and then missed two more shots in the final 5 seconds. A replay review with 2.2 seconds left confirmed Houston would keep the ball when it rolled out of bounds after the second miss.
Uzan took over from there.
“I was trying to hit (L.J. Cryer) and then JoJo just made a great read,” Uzan said. “He was able to draw two (defenders) and he just made a great play to hit me back.”
Houston advanced to the Elite Eight for the third time in five years after falling in the Sweet 16 as a top seed in the previous two editions of March Madness. It will take the nation's longest winning streak, 16 games, into Sunday’s Midwest Region final.
The Cougars joined the other three No. 1 seeds in this year's Elite Eight and did it at Lucas Oil Stadium, where their 2021 tourney run ended with a loss in the Final Four to eventual national champion Baylor.
They haven't lost since Feb. 1.
Uzan scored 22 points and Emanuel Sharp had 17 as Houston survived an off night from leading scorer Cryer, who finished with five points on 2-of-13 shooting.
Houston still had to sweat out a half-court heave at the buzzer, but Braden Smith's shot was well off the mark.
Fletcher Loyer scored 16 points, Trey Kaufman-Renn had 14 and Smith, the Big Ten player of the year, added seven points and 15 assists for fourth-seeded Purdue (24-12). Smith assisted on all 11 second-half baskets for last year’s national runner-up, which played in front of a friendly crowd about an hour’s drive from its campus in West Lafayette.
“I thought we fought really hard and we dug down defensively to get those stops to come back,” Smith said. “We did everything we could and we just had a little miscommunication at the end and they converted. Props to them.”
Houston appeared on the verge of disaster when Kaufman-Renn scored on a dunk and then blocked Cryer’s shot with 1:17 to go, leading to Camden Heide’s 3 that tied the score at 60 with 35 seconds left.
Sampson called timeout to set up the final play, but Uzan missed a turnaround jumper and Tugler’s tip-in rolled off the rim and out of bounds. The Cougars got one more chance after the replay review.
Sharp's scoring flurry early in the second half finally gave Houston some separation after a back-and-forth first half. His 3-pointer at the 16:14 mark made it 40-32. After Purdue trimmed the deficit to four, Uzan made two 3s to give Houston a 10-point lead in a tough, physical game that set up a rare dramatic finish in this year's tourney.
“Smith was guarding the inbounder, so he had to take JoJo,” Sampson said. “That means there was no one there to take Milos. That's why you work on that stuff day after day.”
Takeaways
Purdue: Coach Matt Painter's Boilermakers stumbled into March Madness with six losses in their final nine games but proved themselves a worthy competitor by fighting their way into the Sweet 16 and nearly taking down a No. 1 seed.
Houston: The Cougars lead the nation in 3-point percentage and scoring defense, an enviable combination.
Scary fall
Houston guard Mylik Wilson gave the Cougars a brief scare with 13:23 left in the game. He leapt high into the air to grab a rebound and drew a foul on Kaufman-Renn.
As the play continued, Wilson was undercut and his body twisted around before he landed on his head. Wilson stayed down momentarily, rubbing his head, but eventually got up and remained in the game.