Kenyon Martin says Zaza Pachulia made a dirty play. Stephen Jackson says Zaza Pachulia is a dirty player. Amin Elhassan says the San Antonio Spurs have no room to complain.

It’s the day after the most controversial moment of the mostly lifeless 2017 NBA playoffs — Kawhi Leonard’s injury that sealed the Spurs’ fate — and the panelists on The Jump are riled up. A camera cut to Rachel Nichols shows her hearing out these points but ready to bring up her own.

“We are talking about the guy who almost broke the leg of Kevin Durant — on his own team,” Nichols says, seated on the left side of the round table that Martin, Jackson and Elhassan also crowd. “I think that he is also reckless, and being reckless isn’t OK. That’s different than ‘I’m going to take him out.’ ”

Martin replies, “He’s reckless at times, I get your point. But that play was different. It was unnecessary.”

“Y’all was warming me up to be mad,” Elhassan cracks as the conversation shifts.

But he didn’t get mad. These four people, each having been around the NBA for more than a decade in very different capacities, didn’t end this conversation in agreement, but they ended it. Each side was considered, and no conclusions were drawn. And they moved on.

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Welcome to the new NBA on ESPN. The league has never been more important to the network, with a new contract in which ESPN pays the NBA $1.4 billion per season kicking in this year. The media-rights contract cost ESPN and fellow NBA broadcaster Turner Sports 2.8 times as much as the previous deal, a particularly onerous thought in an era of cord-cutting and more choices than ever that has already impacted ESPN dramatically.

Still, as the NBA experiences a boom thanks to a star-power bubble and the rise of social media, its foremost TV partner has built its programming up. Those efforts includes a new show, new personalities and a new tone as ESPN runs more NBA-focused programming than ever, the combined result of contractual obligation and a desire to steer into the youngest fan base of the four major U.S. sports leagues.

The broadcast stipulations of the NBA’s new TV contract were not disclosed, but The Jump, which debuted in 2016, is one piece of a broader initiative at ESPN on the TV side to reshape its NBA coverage. Major changes to NBA Countdown, including the shift from Sage Steele to Michelle Beadle as host, coincided with changes to sets and production as well as the new NBA contract. Meanwhile, a prominent wave of layoffs cut through the company and led to rebranding and major change on the digital front.

For The Win spoke to 11 current and former ESPN employees, including some of the network’s biggest stars, about the past, present and future of its NBA coverage. And the talk out of Bristol, Conn., and Los Angeles (where much of the NBA crew is located) is one of excitement for the future of a sport many called ESPN’s most important product.

And they want to have fun while doing it. ”Basketball’s a fun sport,” says Kevin Wildes, the ESPN vice president who was put in charge of NBA studio shows in 2016. “We wanted to take the conversations we were having in the production meetings and put them on air. We kind of just wanted to— when you have a straight goal of smarts, smiles, surprises, everyone can understand that we need to go after it. If everyone buys in, you create that more fun atmosphere.”

Dealing with the new deal

The latest round of ESPN cuts produced a blowback rarely seen in a journalism world flooded with layoffs. Nearly every employee to lose his or her job was a front-facing figure, a writer or TV personality with an audience of his or her own. While newspapers and TV stations frequently prefer to keep their most prominent employees — even ESPN had a previous round of cuts that hit largely editors, producers and other behind-the-scenes employees — this meant the Worldwide Leader was saying goodbye to Andy Katz, Jayson Stark and Marc Stein.

Though other areas including college sports took more substantial cuts, the NBA team lost seven reporters, Stein most prominently. But four people with knowledge of the situation reiterated to For The Win that those NBA cuts were “different.” The NBA cuts, which had little to do with the TV side of the operation, were the direct result of a bigger plan to bring in Yahoo star reporter Adrian Wojnarowski and some members of his team at The Vertical.

The people requested anonymity because the Wojnarowski move has yet to be announced publicly or internally, though USA TODAY Sports confirmed that the deal is finalized earlier this month. Any savings from the layoffs — which still involved paying out the contracts of the former employees, as Deadspin first reported in a more detailed look at the layoffs — will in theory be reinvested in that move and in furthered NBA coverage, according to the people.

Their message is clear: ESPN is pulling back on other sports, but the NBA remains a priority — just in a different way than it was before.

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That desire for change has been obvious for a while on the air. Elhassan remembers a conversation more than two years ago with Wildes, who wanted ideas for what a better NBA show would look like. Elhassan and Jade Hoye, a digital video and podcast producer who ran TrueHoop TV and podcast efforts, sat down with Wildes and went over things that worked with them, things popular among the younger audience that they were reaching — a group of fans that NBA Countdown and NBA Tonight weren’t as geared toward.

Elhassan recalls a few pilots and mock-ups of potential shows, including an NBA-only Around the Horn-style show hosted by Beadle as well as even more vague concepts. Meanwhile, during the 2014-15 season, the Grantland Basketball Hour was finishing up its one-season run, with NBA brand leader Bill Simmons leaving ESPN soon after.

The TV deal was starting soon, and ESPN needed a plan. Wildes was promoted from a successful run with SportsNation, and Beadle soon was brought with him. (Both still continue their roles in leading SN.) Nichols was returning to the network with a new NBA show. The roster of analysts was deepened. A blueprint was forming.

Empowering the talent

”This show was the reason I decided to come back,” Nichols said. “They had the opportunity in their contract with the NBA to have an additional show, and it was an opportunity for me to do something different than I had been doing, and it seemed like a great fit all the way around.”

The Jump is Nichols’ show, through and through. But NBA Countdown couldn’t be Beadle’s, just as it couldn’t be lead analyst Jalen Rose’s. The pregame show had been around in various formats since 2002, an essential part of ESPN’s NBA coverage.

The current iteration of Countdown started in 2008, with Stuart Scott as host before he stepped down in 2011 because of health issues. That left a six-year window where Countdown cycled through analysts and hosts in search of a formula that worked — a formula that, even as all involved preferred not to make the comparison, couldn’t match TNT’s Inside the NBA.

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There really isn’t a comparison, though. Inside functions as an extended postgame show, a late-night reverie. Countdown was a half-hour pregame show that largely stuck to the script of promoting the forthcoming game and quickly running through whatever other topics needed to be discussed. The tight format exacerbated chemistry issues, including a heavily discussed fracture between Magic Johnson, Michael Wilbon and Simmons and the shifting roles of host, depending on whether it was Wilbon, Sage Steele or Doris Burke handling the duty.

”We didn’t have a whole lot of time to breathe,” NBA Countdown coordinating producer Amina Hussein says. “From a producer standpoint, we were challenged with trying to get everybody involved. A 30-minute show is basically 22 minutes of content, and we had four different voices. So it was challenging on our end. I’ll take some onus on that. Sometimes I don’t think we put them in the best position to succeed.”

The new NBA deal bumped Countdown up to an hour. That freedom was welcome, but it also created pressure to find the right chemistry. Enter Beadle, whose casual, conversational nature had carried SportsNation. She’d returned to ESPN in 2014 with a target to host Countdown tucked in her pocket.

”I had my eye on it, and unfortunately, the way this business works, some jobs are taken,” she says. “You just either have to be patient or give up completely. But for me, I always thought it would be a no-brainer, and all I wanted was a shot to try it and see if it would work.”

Beadle was formally announced as Countdown’s full-time host at the end of the season. The move created a stir: There were reports that Steele’s conservative political views had come into play, but everyone asked strongly denied — even laughed at — the suggestion. This was a case of Beadle having hosted the show for most of the season, better fitting the tone and direction of the show and being rewarded with her dream job. Steele now will host SportsCenter AM.

Opening up the dialogue

“I love the idea that we ‘Embrace Talk,’ ” Beadle says. She’s playing off the “Embrace Debate” slogan that has been a driving force at ESPN for the past 15 years: put two screamers face-to-face and let them go at it.

“Embrace Debate” drew ratings for ESPN. Still does, to some degree. But the network has clearly shifted priorities in a new era — consider the SportsCenter changes that include SC6 and Scott Van Pelt’s midnight show. The emphasis is on personality, conversation and a looser format.

“I made it very clear to (ESPN executives) that I did not want to be Vanna White in this situation, sort of just asking, ‘What do you think? What do you think?’” Nichols says. “I wanted to make sure that me being an opinionated part of the conversation and having it be a conversation and not sort of serving up pontification topics was the style of show that I was interested in.”

The open-dialogue approach forced some flexibility. The Jump’s early shows included a lot of ESPN reporters and analysts who lacked traditional TV polish or NBA-playing bonafides, such as former NBA front-office executive Elhassan and reporter Zach Lowe. As perhaps the most unique example, Tom Haberstroh went from an ESPN Stats and Information researcher to an Insider statistical analyst to a regular presence on TV, from guest appearances on The Jump and Countdown to doing special features for each.

“Five minutes into (my first episode of The Jump), I get a text from my friend who is a basketball agent,” Elhassan recalls. “And he said, ‘For Tracy McGrady to be on this show, he literally had to be one of the three greatest basketball-playing human beings on the face of the Earth at one time. And you — you have funny tweets.’ At that moment, it hit me.”

The Jump has found a rhythm in its second season, along with a new time slot and network (3 p.m. ET on ESPN) and a year-round order. The guests are a bit higher-profile; Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Scottie Pippen are frequent panelists. But the driving spirit of the show, that a diversity of perspectives creates a better conversation, remains.

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“My pitch of this show has always been, this should feel like you’re sitting around and talking about basketball with your friends — if one of your friends is Tracy McGrady,” Nichols says.

NBA Countdown has stuck with more traditional lineups. But the combination of Beadle, Rose and Chauncey Billups works better than any other group in recent memory for Countdown. Beadle’s pacing, Rose’s charisma and Billups’ analytical breakdowns form a team that can handle hour-long shows and deeper, more divisive topics.

Two other small tricks of the trade helped: the SportsNation-style boxes that highlight each panelist’s reaction to videos and images on screen, and the decision to no longer let the panelists know each other’s views on topics before going on air.

“TV can be too scripted, like, ‘Just make sure we talk about these eight things,’ ” Rose says. “Well, sometimes those eight things may morph into six things. Those eight things may morph into five things. That’s something I appreciate that we continue to do, and it really hopefully creates a level of conversation that is passionate, knowledgable and genuine. You still have to be all three.”

Building toward a cloudy future

“Passionate, knowledgable and genuine” seems to be at the core of what ESPN wants in its NBA coverage. Yet those ideologies were tested by the layoffs and fallout.

The TrueHoop Network was a core piece of ESPN.com’s approach to the sport for a decade, after hiring Henry Abbott and buying it in 2007. Originally a collection of team blogs, the Network expanded into TrueHoop Presents (focused on off-beat enterprise stories), TrueHoop TV (a short-lived live video chat format) and the TrueHoop Podcast, run by Hoye.

Abbott, deputy director of ESPN.com NBA content, was one of the layoffs. The result was the deconstruction of the TrueHoop brand. A person with knowledge of the situation says ESPN executives hadn’t even considered the podcast in killing the TrueHoop brand, but they heard about it quickly enough. A Reddit was launched, and a Mashable article expressed the thoughts of many fans with its headline: “ESPN killed something else with its layoffs, its best hope to reach millennials.” An overstatement to be sure, but the move echoed the 2015 demise of Grantland in alienating young readers and listeners.

“We looked at TV and radio as the establishment,” says Elhassan, the most prominent star of the TrueHoop brand. “And the establishment had their way of handling their coverage. And we had our way, and that was the way were going to handle our podcast. It wasn’t always going to be serious. It wasn’t always going to be on topic, but that’s kind of the approach we had to it.”

The mentality lives on, though. The Basketball Analogy quickly replaced TrueHoop as ESPN’s irreverent podcast of choice. Moreover, its reach is felt throughout ESPN’s TV and web coverage of the league; Haberstroh’s latest magazine piece, an examination of LeBron James’ free throw style, might as well have been a TrueHoop Presents feature and was discussed on several ESPN shows.

NBA Sidecasts also popped up, in the vein of the Voices room in ESPN’s College Football National Championship Game Megacast. The second-screen experience featured ESPN NBA personalities sitting around a Los Angeles studio and watching and commenting on whatever game was airing on ESPN. The three Sidecasts so far have been as informal as anything on ESPN; see Nichols holding a lavalier microphone up to a tablet for “field reporters.”

Expect more Sidecasts in the future, though probably not for the Finals because of differences between ABC and ESPN rights deals. The ESPN3 platform also features streaming pregame warmup video, as alternative viewing options are further explored.

Second-screen viewership was an important factor in the decision to bring on Wojnarowski, too. The NBA’s foremost news-breaker was allowed to create The Vertical on Yahoo Sports in early 2016, with an emphasis on news, video analysis and podcasts. But the best asset for ESPN may end up being The Vertical’s live Web shows for the NBA draft and free agency that drew millions of viewers desperate for the best information fastest.

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The unknown specifics of The Vertical’s future with ESPN loom large because it is so strikingly different from TrueHoop in ethos; Wojnarowski and his brand projects professionalism and places reporting and insider information above all else. The Vertical’s podcasts tend to be informative and in-depth but more straight-laced than TrueHoop or The Basketball Analogy. It’s hard to imagine Wojnarowski fitting in easily on the next Sidecast.

One of the toughest questions to answer about the layoffs was how getting rid of Abbott and people like podcast favorite Ethan Strauss fit into this grand-scheme plan for ESPN’s NBA coverage. Given how big a role the TrueHoop brand and mentality has had on ESPN’s coverage, getting rid of the man that built it seems like a strange move. But the TV and digital ends of ESPN remain worlds apart despite the increasing synergy. Moreover, Wojnarowski remains at the top of the profession in terms of breaking news and insider sourcing, and ESPN is not in the business of losing.

That competitive spirit is what led ESPN to outbidding Fox and others for top NBA rights. It’s what led ESPN to rebuilding its NBA coverage from the top down, bringing in Wildes and others to help bring life to the discourse.

“Basketball is a cool sport,” Elhassan says, echoing Wildes. And in that sense, it’s at the front of the innovation curve as well. One question asked to every person interviewed for this story was whether these tone changes only made sense for the NBA’s younger, more diverse audience.

“Baseball could use a nice injection of a sense of humor,” Beadle says. “Every sport could use that because it’s just entertainment at the end of the day.”

There’s no doubt that ESPN treats the NBA a little differently. The young, social-media-savvy audience demands it — and lends a nice testing ground for new approaches and more open conversation. With Kendrick Lamar as the soundtrack.

“In my opinion, this is the direction things are going to go overall,” Nichols says. “Change happens. You can’t stop change. So whether it’s slowly or quickly, depending on the sport, we’ll see. But sports evolve, viewers evolve, TV evolves. None of it’s stagnant.”

That’s the pressure on ESPN’s NBA coverage: stay one step ahead and build an audience even as the audience becomes more difficult to reach. Billions of dollars are counting on it.