OG Anunoby’s tip-in delivered Game 4 of the NBA Finals to the Knicks in one of the most chaotic, gut-punch finishes the playoffs have maybe ever produced. In the disorienting seconds that followed, ESPN’s broadcast went looking for reaction shots and found nearly everyone in Madison Square Garden except the players who had just authored the moment.
That’s the indictment The Ringer’s Bryan Curtis delivered on Friday’s episode of The Press Box, dissecting exactly where the ESPN truck pointed its cameras once Anunoby’s shot dropped through. By Curtis’s accounting, the broadcast didn’t just miss the players but conducted a guided tour of celebrity row instead.
“Here’s my other nitpick,” Curtis said. “Immediately after the Anunoby tip, we start looking for faces, because that’s what a director does in that instance — they look for faces. Well, we saw a couple of Knicks, but then we went into celebrity row, and we saw John Calipari’s face, Adam Sandler’s, Jerry Seinfeld’s. We saw Taylor Swift and the girls, we saw John McEnroe and Larry David. You even saw David Zaslav. We never saw Jalen Brunson’s face — Jalen Brunson, who just got bailed out by his teammate. Never saw him. We never saw the faces of any of the San Antonio Spurs, who just got beaten in the most pull-the-heart-out-of-your-chest way possible.”
After OG Anunoby’s shot, the ESPN truck went all-in on celebrities and forgot about the players who’d just won and lost the game.
Full pod here: https://t.co/Y24uDyF9zb pic.twitter.com/eWEcCQx1Ur
— Bryan Curtis (@bryancurtis) June 12, 2026
The most glaring absence, in Curtis’s telling, belonged to Victor Wembanyama, the towering Spurs star who had been draped on Brunson during the very possession that produced the rebound and the eventual winner.
“Wemby is one of the most popular athletes on the planet right now,” Curtis said. “He was trying to guard Jalen Brunson. We didn’t have a picture of his face after the ball went in? Crazy. Absolutely crazy. We’re showing all the celebrities, and I understand that’s part of the MSG thing, certainly been part of the story of the Finals, but who gives a sh*t what John Calipari thinks? That’s just, again, elementary directing and producing. When you have a big moment, you show winners, and you show losers. Winners and losers. In this case, we went to John Calipari, Jerry Seinfeld.”
Curtis’s grievance dovetails with a separate failure in ESPN’s Game 4 coverage, which was the broadcast’s near-total silence on De’Aaron Fox’s decision to barrel into a contested layup with the Spurs clinging to a one-point lead in the dying seconds, rather than protecting the ball and letting the clock — or a foul — work in San Antonio’s favor. ABC never replayed the play, never interrogated it on air, and let slip a timeout immediately afterward that practically begged for the conversation. The first acknowledgment that Fox never needed to shoot arrived five minutes into the Inside the NBA postgame show, courtesy of Charles Barkley.
The two complaints expose the same blind spot from different angles. In a finish decided entirely by what Brunson, Wembanyama, Anunoby, and Fox did with the ball in their hands, ESPN’s broadcast spent its precious seconds of live reaction elsewhere, panning across Madison Square Garden’s star-studded lower bowl and parsing Jose Alvarado’s footwork, while the people who’d actually decided the game disappeared from the frame.
Watching celebrities react live has its own appeal, but ESPN leaned on it so hard in the moment that the players who decided the game barely made it on screen.