San Francisco Giants and KNBR today announced a multi-year extension to keep Giants games on the Sports Leader through 2025.
For more than 4 decades, the Giants/KNBR partnership has featured nearly 7,000 regular season broadcasts and some of the most monumental events in Giants history, including the 1989 World Series, the opening of Oracle Park in 2000, the 2002 World Series, Barry Bonds’ pursuit of the all‐time home run record and 2010, 2012, and 2014 World Series Championships.
“We are excited that KNBR will continue to deliver Giants baseball on the radio to Giants fans everywhere,” said Giants President and CEO Larry Baer. “Led by best broadcast team in all of Major League Baseball in Jon Miller, Duane Kuiper, Mike Krukow and Dave Flemming, we are thrilled that our partnership will continue to deliver top-caliber play‐by‐play broadcasts, the pre‐game “Kruk & Kuip Show,” the “Post Game Wrap” and the off-season’s “Hot Stove League” for many years to come.”
“We’re elated that Giants baseball and KNBR will continue to be the Bay Area’s favorite summer soundtrack for years to come,” said Doug Harvill, Vice President/Market Manager for Cumulus Radio. “Between KNBR’s powerful AM/FM signals and our streaming platforms, we look forward to providing fans with multiple options to enjoy every Giants game.”
They would have to acquire a "generational" superstar, the San Francisco Chronicle's Connor Letourneau reported Monday, citing a team source.
"Golden State knows that any discussion for an All-Star-caliber player will begin with the other team asking for one or both of the franchise’s two biggest assets outside of Stephen Curry, Klay Thompson and Draymond Green: the top-three-protected 2021 pick from Minnesota and rookie center James Wiseman," Letourneau wrote Monday.
"But according to a team source, the Warriors 'almost definitely' wouldn’t surrender that Timberwolves selection or Wiseman unless they got back someone generational such as Joel Embiid or Giannis Antetokounmpo."
Citing league sources, The Ringer's Kevin O'Connor reported Monday that the Warriors are interested in Victor Oladipo ahead of the trade deadline later this month. Warriors general manager and president of basketball operations Bob Myers told NBC Sports Bay Area last week that the Warriors won't give up a prized asset for a short-term push. Oladipo, 28, is months away from becoming an unrestricted free agent.
"However, just because Golden State likes a multi-time All-Star who fits a win-now mindset doesn’t mean it is willing to mortgage its future to maybe win a postseason series," Letourneau wrote. "As is always the case with potential trade scenarios, the Warriors would have to see what they’d need to give up for Oladipo. Parting with a package that would hurt their odds of staying relevant long-term would almost certainly be a conversation-ender.
| Warriors on NBCS |
| @NBCSWarriors |
bit.ly/3v3Xhtj pic.twitter.com/
-THIS YEAR - BE THE SCORER WIGGINGS ISN’T ON 2ND TEAM
-NEXT YEAR - COULD BE SCORING 6TH MAN OFF BENCH ....
D- LET’S ANSWER THESE....
| Anthony Slater |
| @anthonyVslate |
1. Kelly Oubre's future. (I’D TAKE HIM OVER WIGGINS) - IF NOT DO U TRADE HIM?
2. James Wiseman's second half development. (THAT’S WHAT THE 2ND H IS ALL ABOUT)
3. Clarifying Eric Paschall's role (NEEDS TO PLAY BOTH F SPOTS, FORGET SMALL BALL C , WISEMAN, GREEN WILL SPLIT THAT IN FUTURE)
4. Alen Smailagic's roster spot (THERE ISN’T ONE)
5. The Wolves. (KEEP OR TRADE)
theathletic.com/
The 49ers, with the No. 12 overall pick, would likely need to include a young star such as end Nick Bosa or linebacker Fred Warner as part of a deal. The argument could be made the Niners should hold on to their top players, keep Garoppolo and use their draft capital to continue building out the roster. Bosa, in particular, seems like an unlikely trade chip given his youth, relative inexpensive price tag and the value the Niners place on pass-rushers. Sacrificing too many resources would also make the Niners less attractive to a player such as Watson.
But Tannenbaum believes Watson would give the Niners the type of franchise centerpiece who could offset just about any player they might trade.
"Nick Bosa is one of the three or four best non-quarterbacks in the league but it would have to take someone like Deshaun Watson for me to even consider trading him," Tannenbaum said. "But to get somebody like Deshaun Watson, he changes your franchise for the next 10 years. You're getting Steph Curry. You're getting a great player and you're getting a great leader and a great person. Would you trade Nick Bosa to get Steph Curry?"
While the Texans seem intent on keeping their quarterback, Watson seems to be digging in, which leaves teams interested in his services -- and there will be many -- waiting on the periphery and formulating a plan if something changes.
According to Tannenbaum, who was general manager of the New York Jets and the Miami Dolphins executive vice president of football operations, the NFL draft is the logical time for the Texans to decide whether their relationship with Watson can be salvaged.
TENNEBAUM:
A deal for Watson still seems like a long shot barring him specifically requesting a trade to the Niners. Which means Garoppolo with new backups remains the most likely path for the Niners in 2021. But crazy things happen in the NFL and with the cap dropping and the quarterback carousel already spinning, nothing should be ruled out.
"Once you have this quarterback, it just changes everything," Tannenbaum said. "Regardless of what the price is, you'll look back and laugh. First-round picks, depending on where you pick, aren't always a certainty. Deshaun Watson is a certainty."
MOST EGREGIOUS ERRORS:
1-PASSING ON WATSON AND MAHOMES FOR SOLOMON THOMAS. (NEEDED A QB)
2- SIGNING DEE FORD.
3- CHOOSING ARMSTEAD / WARD OVER BUCKNER.
4- DANTE PETTIS 2ND ROUND, 44 OVERALL 2018.
5-TRADING UP TO TAKE REUBEN FOSTER IN 2017
The San Francisco 49ers were one throw away from a Super Bowl victory after the 2019 season.
Or so the myth would have you believe that Jimmy Garoppolo’s overthrow of Emmanuel Sanders cost the Niners their sixth Super Bowl title. And even if it was Robert Saleh’s defense that folded in the second half, 49ers fans and much of the media has taken to pointing the finger at Garoppolo after a post-season run that saw head coach Kyle Shanahan largely eliminate the quarterback from the offense.
“If Shanahan doesn’t trust him, why should we?” became a common complaint from Niners fans.
It didn’t help that in the follow-up to the uninspiring 2019 postseason that Garoppolo would once again struggle on the field and once again miss time due to injury in 2020 as the 49ers won just six games—but still too many to be in comfortable position to draft a quarterback in Round 1.
And now general manager John Lynch must do something he hasn’t been very good at—identify, evaluate and value draft prospects.
That might seem harsh considering the 49ers were in the Super Bowl just 15 months ago, but let’s look line-by-line at where this team stands.
1. The 49ers are 29-35 in the regular season under Lynch and Shanahan.
2. The 49ers are an aging team with nine starters and 26 total players set to hit free agency.
3. Under Lynch, the 49ers have yet to draft a first-rounder that is a blue chip building block on the roster (Solomon Thomas, Reuben Foster, Mike McGlinchey, Nick Bosa, Javon Kinlaw, Brandon Aiyuk).
And before you say Nick Bosa, it’s way too early to consider him a true building block given his injury history in college and that he missed all but two games in 2020 due to injury. Bosa looked very good in 2019, but he was also playing next to an All-Pro in DeForest Buckner (whom Lynch traded away).
The ceiling on Bosa is very high, but nine sacks so far doesn’t make him a blue chip building block. If he can stay healthy in 2021, it’s a different conversation.
-IS IT FAIR TO QUESTION LYNCH AND SHANAHAN?
-WAS 2019 THE OUTLIER?
-WAS JIMMY ACTUALLY A MISTAKE (BRADY, COUSINS, A ROOKIE?)
-DO YOU TRUST THEM TO SIGN/DRAFT THE RIGHT GUYS ?
-MAKE OR BREAK YEAR?
BROUGHT IN: JIMMY, KITTLE, TRENT WILLIAMS, AIYUK, BOSA, DEE FORD, DRE GREENLAW, KERRY HYDER, DJ JONES, MCGLINCHEY, DEBO, SHERMAN, TOMLINSON, VERRETT, WARNER, K’WAUN, JEFF WILSON JR.
NFL:
This week, the NFL may announce the long-awaited renewal of its TV deals, and while the money the league reaps roughly doubles, there will be little change for fans. Sunday afternoon games will be on CBS and Fox, Sunday night on NBC, and Monday night on ESPN (and maybe ABC).
There is one exception, and it’s a tectonic shift, sources said, echoing a Wall Street Journal report: Amazon Prime will not only renew its slate of Thursday Night games, but also will gain exclusivity on a healthy portion of them. Currently, Amazon shares the Thursday games with NFL Network and Fox, and the league’s in-house organ will almost surely retain some overlap. But a meaningful number of games will only be on Prime. This is the kind of pivotal moment experts may talk about for decades, akin to Fox winning rights to the NFL in 1994 or when “Monday Night Football” moved from network to cable TV in 2006.
“So think about that first NFL deal with ESPN. Think about the first Major League Baseball deal with ESPN where you just, you couldn’t believe that,” said Scott Rosner, Academic Director of the sports management program at Columbia University, who recalled the surprise viewers had when sports properties they considered their “God-given right” to watch migrated from over-the-air to cable TV.
Media analyst Rich Greenfield, emphasizing the historic development, wrote in a report last week: “Amazon Prime taking over Thursday Night Football is a watershed moment in TV history that will undoubtedly accelerate the demise of (traditional) TV and the multichannel bundle. To be clear, (traditional) TV’s downfall was happening with or without Amazon Prime buying NFL rights, but this move simply adds fuel to the bundle’s fire.”
This all sounds good, and the NFL reportedly is getting $1 billion annually from Amazon, but there is the elephant in the room: audience size. Last season’s lone exclusive game on Prime — an experiment of sorts — fetched the equivalent of 4.8 million viewers on Amazon’s Prime and Twitch, far below even a poorly rated NFL game. “The NFL is certainly not known historically for migrating towards platforms where the audience would decrease, right,” Rosner said. “It’s always been, you know, how can we get the greatest number of people.”
Indeed, for generations, the NFL has been committed to putting games before the widest audience possible, a strategy that helped make it the country’s top sport. For years that meant broadcast TV, until the league put one of its premier products, “Monday Night Football,” on ESPN in 2006. It was actually the NFL’s second foray into cable, since there were Sunday night games on ESPN and Turner Sports from 1987 to 2005, before the Sunday night package became the league’s premier TV destination. But through the mid-2010s the cable bundle thrived, topping 100 million homes, not far off the total number of TV homes. Events as diverse as the college football championship and Wimbledon migrated in whole to cable.
Defenders of the Amazon move make the point that Prime has 142 million US subscribers, and Nielsen-rated TV homes are at 121 million.
“You are now looking at an environment where there’s a larger total addressable market for one of the big streaming services that has a growing sports appetite and growing sports brand,” said Tom Richardson, senior vice president of strategy for Mercury Intermedia, a mobile-connected TV development company.
It is true that Amazon is more ubiquitous in our daily lives for many than TV. But there are the old habits and patterns of watching sports, and Prime doesn’t come to mind first. Sunday afternoons are still about flipping on the television as the NFL’s enormous ratings underscore, notwithstanding this past season’s 7 percent decline.
“Most of us are still viewing most live sports through traditional channels,” Richardson said. “So part of the challenge will be to educate and motivate people to, you know, use these outlets more commonly, more broadly, in terms of what I call first-option viewing.”
Tom Spock, a former NFL executive and co-founder of Scalar Media, countered that those habits are already changing and soon Prime will be seen as just another channel.
“I cut the cord a few years ago, so for me, Amazon is exactly like Netflix. It’s like Hulu with live TV,” he said. “So I still get all the local channels. But when I turn on my Roku, or my iPad, or wherever I’m looking, they’re just channels again. So, to me, Amazon is as accessible to the next wave of entertainment consumers, as you know, as whatever channel Fox is on in your local market.”
Fox is currently paying $660 million a year for “Thursday Night Football,” which the network made clear was too steep for renewal. It needed the resources for the Sunday package doubling to $2 billion a year. (There are another two seasons remaining on the Thursday night deal before the new one kicks in, unless there are changes made with the new contracts). Amazon with its enormous resources can afford to pay more because it has the cash and it doesn’t need the deal to pencil out because it is about marketing the whole Prime product.
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