Rachel Nichols basketball journalism career has taken a new bounce.
The longtime sports reporter is joining Showtime’s sports division, where shewill work on the unit’s basketball content vertical as both a host andproducer.
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“We are delighted to welcome Rachel Nichols to the Showtime Basketballfamily,” said Brian Dailey, senior vice president of sports programming andcontent for Showtime, in a prepared statement. “Rachel brings unmatchedjournalistic credibility, great familiarity with our roster and a work ethicthat will take us to another level.”
She has also carried some baggage. Nichols left her previous employer, WaltDisney’s ESPN, after becoming embroiled in a controversy in which a videorecording of her complaining about a colleague, Maria Taylor, being awarded arole Nichols had been guaranteed under contract, became public. The revelationof the video spurred internal complaints and division within the sports-mediagiant. ESPN took Nichols off her daily basketball show, “The Jump,” and bothshe and Taylor ended up leaving the company.
Nichols has for the first time addressed the squabble and its causes. Speakingon “All The Smoke With Matt Barnes and Stephen Jackson, a Showtime Basketballvideo podcast, Nichols discussed the incident, noting that the recording wastaken of her while she was in a Florida hotel room to work on site for ESPN’sNBA coverage, inadvertently leaving open a video line to ESPN’s Bristol, CTheadquarters. The line was broadcasting for hours, she said, but no one atESPN told her. “One person decided to just sit and watch and start spying onme, like I was their own personal television show,” Nichols said. “When theyheard something they thought was juicy, they picked up their cell phone andthey started recording me.”
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At issue were hosting duties for ESPN’s annual coverage of the NBA Finals,something Nichols says she had been assigned as part of contract with thesports-media outlet. ESPN executives, Nichols says, wanted to give Taylorthose responsibilities, and pressured Nichols to give them up. But hosting theFinals had been a “dream,” she says, and so she discussed the issue duringphone calls while staying in the hotel room
“I feel very sorry that any of this touched Maria Taylor, because she is afellow woman in this business. It wasn’t her fault that any of this was goingon,” says Nichols. “To even bring her into that was a mistake on my part, andthat it caused her to be upset in any way — I don’t want to be that person.”Nichols says she tried to arrange a meeting with Taylor, but was unable to doso. Taylor is now working for NBC Sports, where she was recently named thehost of “Football Night in America.”
Basketball-themed content on Showtime includes feature length documentariesand docu-series. Some of the projects have been produced by LeBron James’SpringHill Company and Kevin Durant’s 35 Ventures.
Nichols has a long history with basketball. She helped create ESPN’s daily NBAprogram, “The Jump,” and hosted it from its inception in 2016. She spentnearly a decade writing for The Washington Post, where she covered the NHL,NBA, MLB, tennis and the Olympics. She also worked at Turner Sports from 2013to 2016 where she hosted CNN’s “Unguarded With Rachel Nichols” and, coveredthe NBA, the NCAA men’s basketball tournament and the MLB playoffs. amongother events. Her first stint at ESPN began in 2004, where she covered theNFL, NBA, contributed as a correspondent for E:60 and frequented SportsCenter.
She joins Showtime, part of Paramount Global, as speculation has begun to rampup about the next round of TV rights for the NBA. The league’s currentcontract with ESPN and Warner Bros. Discovery’s Turner Sports lapses after the2024-2025 season. Business observers wonder whether Warner Bros. Discovery,which is grappling with a significant amount of debut since its formationearlier this year, will be eager to pay what are likely to be significantincreases in costs to keep the NBA under its aegis.
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