NBA Playoffs 2025: As Play-In Tourney Continues, TNT Sports Preps Escalated Game-Day Tech for Postseason

17/04/2025

NBA Playoffs 2025: As Play-In Tourney Continues, TNT Sports Preps Escalated Game-Day Tech for Postseason Opening rounds to feature regular-season setup; later rounds to get more gear By Kristian Hern ndez, Senior Editor

Thursday, April 17, 2025 - 11:52 am

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With the 2024-25 NBA season hitting crunch time, TNT Sports is rallying its production and operations teams to deliver another compelling postseason of top-tier professional basketball. Beginning with two games in the 2025 NBA Play-In Tournament on Tuesday night and one more to go on Friday night at State Farm Arena in the broadcaster's hometown, the productions have served as a warmup for the playoffs, with Round 1 games on Sunday, April 20 in Cleveland and Houston and on Monday, April 21 in New York City and Denver.

The first games went extremely well on Tuesday night, says Chris Brown, VP, technology and operations, TNT Sports. [The Play-In Tournament] gives our ops teams a little ramp-up to the start of the playoffs run.

Follow the Narrative: Production Team Can Enhance the Tech To Match Game Intensity The NBA postseason is habitually a long sprint to the finish. Taking place over multiple weeks in numerous cities across the country, the broadcasts ask a lot out of TNT Sports' staffers dedicated to showcasing the league's biggest games of the year. To ease into the playoffs and ensure that each game receives the utmost attention in terms of coverage and quality, the broadcaster is rolling out a technological arsenal deployed during the six-month regular season.

It does follow a certain sort of format that we've managed year over year, Brown explains. The first two rounds will pretty much mimic our regular-season coverage, especially in the first round since those games aren't exclusive and we'll be compressed for space in many of the main camera areas and the loading dock.

During the regular season, the production effort also contributed to the TNT Overtime digital-centric offering, which requires a higher level of tech to cater to that specific audience. The effort, which exceeds the tech that other broadcasters use for the regular season, will continue in the postseason as well.

We do a whole lot more in this very short time during the year, adds Brown. The goal is essentially to maintain that base level of coverage for the national audience.

Riding with a formula that has proved successful in recent seasons, the production team will pay attention to the narrative of each series and follow its progress. In the later stages of a Game 6 or 7 for a particular matchup, for example, the team will decide whether to break out more tech enhancements to capture the high intensity of win-or-go-home contests.

It will be at our production team's discretion to enhance their coverage as they see fit, says Brown.

In the Compound: A Quartet of NEP Mobile Units To Cover Four Arenas With workflows increasing as the bracket unfolds, a large chunk of these productions will rely on TNT Sports' crews working from within the broadcast compound. One of four NEP mobile units - Supershooter 6, 7, 8, and 9 - will be parked outside each arena, and, as each series moves along, the broadcaster will decide which city and venue each unit heads to next. After the Atlanta Hawks' final play-in game on Friday night, the four will be spread across the country: at Cleveland's Rocket Arena, at Houston's Toyota Center, New York's Madison Square Garden, and Denver's Ball Arena.

At TNT Sports' Techwood facility in Atlanta, the crew will deploy the standard remote-graphics production model. Graphics operators will continue to be located in the Remote Operations Center (ROC), where they have worked since the last time they were onsite, at the 2025 NBA All-Star Game at San Francisco's Chase Center in February. To get the feed from multiviewers on the onsite trucks to Atlanta, the crew will rely on the services of Haivision.

We've had a couple occasions, Brown notes, when our regular production trucks couldn't get from city to city in time, so our remote graphics kit wasn't installed in time, and we'd have to send a graphics team out [to the venue]. We plan on continuing our remote-graphics workflow into the playoffs because, no matter where we are or how quick the turnaround is, we always know that our graphics operators are in the same place for every game.

In addition to graphics' being controlled from Atlanta, a handful of EVS operators will be controlling replay from the ROC.

Sports-Filled Spring: TNT Sports Faces Long Stretch of Postseason Play A tradition that continues every year, TNT Sports will be producing a large slate of high-leverage games. That includes coverage not only of the NBA Playoffs but also simultaneous productions of the NHL Playoffs and MLB Tuesday games. The effort requires coordination between various production and technical teams at Techwood, as well as an understanding of the logistics and pacing of each league's action. It's a ferocious, unrelenting, and fast-paced time of the year, but Brown is surrounded by technical experts to handle it all.

For the NBA productions, he notes, the crew includes Technical Operations Manager Brent Brown; Tech Managers Dean Koenig and Brian Irrizarry, who worked the Play-In game between the Orlando Magic and Atlanta Hawks at Orlando's Kia Center; and Tech Managers Debra Zouvas and Shaun Reid, who worked the other Play-In game between the Memphis Grizzlies and Golden State Warriors in the Bay Area.

We're excited that the company at large has leaned into the retooling of Techwood with the addition of control rooms and infrastructure in the ROC that's able to accommodate some of these remote workflows, says Brown. The investment

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