TV Show: Grantland basketball hour | Thurs 7 PM ESPN

[Slava]

VIEWING ALERT!!!!!

At 7 p.m. ET on Thursday (10/23), The Grantland Basketball Hour makes its triumphant debut on ESPN. Your hosts? Bill Simmons and Jalen Rose, who will be joined by Jeff Van Gundy, Doc Rivers, Michelle Beadle, Zach Lowe and rappers Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac Shakur. We made up only two of those guests. Watch us live, add us to your DVR season pass, do whatever you need to do. One hour of free basketball chatter, 7 p.m. Thursday, ESPN. See you there.

Grantland

Not sure what to think of this, Simmons' personality is not great on TV but he has an entertaining rapport with Jalen Rose, from his videocasts Zach Lowe looks like he has the camera presence of stale rubber, Tupac and BIG are dead. I'm excited to get an hour of Jeff Van Gundy.

[JLei]

VIEWING ALERT!!!!!

At 7 p.m. ET on Thursday (10/23), The Grantland Basketball Hour makes its triumphant debut on ESPN. Your hosts? Bill Simmons and Jalen Rose, who will be joined by Jeff Van Gundy, Doc Rivers, Michelle Beadle, Zach Lowe and rappers Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac Shakur. We made up only two of those guests. Watch us live, add us to your DVR season pass, do whatever you need to do. One hour of free basketball chatter, 7 p.m. Thursday, ESPN. See you there.

Grantland

Not sure what to think of this, Simmons' personality is not great on TV but he has an entertaining rapport with Jalen Rose, from his videocasts Zach Lowe looks like he has the camera presence of stale rubber, Tupac and BIG are dead. I'm excited to get an hour of Jeff Van Gundy.

I think it's more so that Lowe while is the best writer in the business and is great on podcasts as the expert vs. Simmons the fan/ media guy, he's a bit too smart in his breakdown of basketball for average joes and quite frankly most NBA fans on this forum. People watching him on TV for the first time just won't give him the credibility he needs for his analysis to work since he doesn't really have coaching/ playing credentials.

Judging by how many casual fans on this board react to pretty common and obvious things found in analytics, a lot of what he says won't go over super well even though he'll be obviously right since TV watchers are conditioned to pre conceived notions from the pundits and the former players. That Open Court analytics discussion was a **** disaster as well as the next 10.

He's absolutely Simmons guy though and Simmons has a tremendous amount of respect for him and I think that Simmons will absolutely prop him up and build him to be a cornerstone piece of his show. But it will take time.

I'm worried Jalen will cut him down and you can already tell through his own podcast and some of his discussions with Bill about Lowe's opinions is that he disagrees and dismisses some of them. Jalen has the pedigree for the casual fan because he was a player.