Thanks are in Order to ESPN for Making a Finals Halftime Show So Objectively Terrible No One Will Make the Mistake of Watching It Again

Maddie Meyer. Getty Images.

Between the Celtics harvesting souls, Kristaps Porzingis' return, and Kyrie Irving failing on a global flat, disc-shaped scale:

… it's hard to imagine a more satisfying start to the NBA Finals. But not to be lost in the excitement is the great public service ESPN did the nation with their halftime show. Because whether you bleed green or hate the Celtics like you hate the thought of Boston reestablishing itself as the City of Champions with what would be its 13th Duckboat parade in the 21st century, we can all agree kudos are in order to the World Wide Leader for sparing us from ever sitting through another halftime show the rest of this series. 

Source - If you missed ESPN’s halftime show from Game 1 of the NBA Finals on Thursday night, you didn’t miss much.

The Boston Celtics dominated the first half of Game 1. When the second quarter ended, the ESPN on ABC broadcast went to commercial. When it came back, Mike Breen and J.J. Redick … focused on Boston’s great three-point shooting in the first half. The segment lasted about 20 seconds. When it was done, the broadcast cut away to another commercial break. 

After the commercial break … [h]ost Malika Andrews kicked it over to Michael Wilbon. … Bob Myers and Stephen A. Smith also both briefly spoke in the segment that, rounding up, lasted a minute. 

As it turned out, the brief commentary of Wilbon, Myers and Smith was the studio crew’s longest non-commercial segment of halftime. … All told, the studio crew got roughly a minute and 20 seconds of air time.

Rather than get angry, like most of the basketball-viewing public seems to be:

Advertisement

… we should be grateful. We owe Bristol a debt of gratitude. The time for anger is when a show sucks you in by convincing you early on this will be worth watching. I still hold a grudge against LOST for convincing me to stick around because all the dangling plot threads will make sense and all the loose threads tied up neatly. Only to end the series after like seven seasons where it turns out everyone was in purgatory the whole time. Which we all guessed from the pilot episode but they denied. If you're going to get mad, get made at The Mandalorian for pivoting in Season 3 to focus on some side character trying to become queen of Mandalor. Save your resentment for the last 25 years of The Simpsons still existing. 

The Finals halftime show is guilty of none of these sins. They came right out in Game 1 and announced to the world "This is hot garbage. Do not watch us. We will be deliberately wasting your precious time selling you fast food and insurance. We're not here to please you. For Game 2, find yourself a nice 15-20 minute YouTube. Or better yet, go out and touch grass and be happy." 

You rarely find that level of honesty in popular entertainment these days. Any more than you find networks acting like it's 1979 and TV remote technology is still in its infancy. If ESPN is going to treat you like it's the days when they were showing the Slow Pitch Softball World Series and college soccer and Chris Berman had hair, and America still had an attention span, at least they're letting you know now. Not three games from now. There's no bait-and-switch at work here. Just switch. Which we will all do at the end of the 2nd quarter the rest of the Finals. Thanks for sucking so hard, so soon, WWL.