Few analysts can break down the game of basketball like ESPN’s Tim Legler. The former NBA sharpshooter is most often seen next to Scott Van Pelt on SportsCenter throughout the NBA season and especially now in the midst of the NBA Finals.
Legler uses an iPad and different tools to illustrate how teams capitalize on matchups and use different actions to win games. The ESPN analyst appeared on The Lowe Post podcast with ESPN NBA writer Zach Lowe this week and gave some insight into how the film segments come together.
“I’m not nervous about my operation of the mechanics of it,” Legler said on the show. “I just put so much time into it, but you’re relying on technology not failing on you, and there’s nothing worse than when something freezes up, and you can’t do anything about it.”
Legler said he still gets nervous that malfunctions will cause dead air, but his preparation and the timeliness of his production staff help keep those few and far between.
“Over the course of a game,” Legler continued. “Particularly the Finals, I’m going to have 12-15 pages of notes by the time that game ends. There are storylines throughout the game that you are following. So I’ll have to write down time, score, and a quick note on the play, and you are trying to see a pattern.”
Legler said the overarching focus is to use all of the preparation to shape a story about why a team wins. The clip preparation can be “tough” because he goes on immediately after the final buzzer.
“The other thing is I’m on right after the game,” Legler described to Lowe. “So if that game comes down to the last possession maybe that’s the play I want to do the breakdown of you’re going to be literally waiting until the last second. It takes them [production] a few seconds to go find the play, to get it to loaded onto the iPad, all that stuff.”
The analyst tries to make it as seamless as possible by giving the production crew exact times and scores of the clips he wants. Check out the full segment with Legler right here.