Live From NBA All-Star 2026: NBC Sports' Ryan Soucy and Kim Titone on Ops for a New Era of NBA on NBC'

The operations team reimagined traditional workflows were reimagined and built an infrastructure from the ground up

NBC Sports returned to NBA All-Star coverage after more than two decades away, while also navigating what the broadcaster has dubbed Legendary February - a month in which NBCUniversal is simultaneously producing the Super Bowl, 2026 Milan Cortino Winter Olympics, and NBA All-Star Weekend.

For VP, Production Operations, Ryan Soucy and Kim Titone, Senior Director, NBA Operations, the assignment required reimagining traditional workflows and building an operational infrastructure from scratch.

SVG sat down with Titone, who oversaw NBA ops for TNT Sports for several years before moving to NBC prior to this season, and Soucy, who started his career at NBC as an intern during the NBA on NBC glory days, to discuss the operational complexities of producing All-Star amid unprecedented scheduling constraints, fostering collaborative relationships with the NBA and fellow broadcasters, and creating a culture that would carry the entire NBA on NBC team through the grueling season-long campaign.

This is NBC's first NBA All-Star Game since 2002. What differentiates this production from previous All-Star broadcasts?

Titone: My first NBA All-Star was in 2018 at Staples Center with Turner Sports and now I am incredibly lucky to be back in Los Angeles for my ninth NBA All-Star - this time with NBC Sports. This is such a special event and I am thankful for the opportunity to continue to work on it!

Soucy: I was an intern and runner back when the NBA on NBC was in full force, so it's amazing to come full circle. Our counterparts at the NBA have been tremendous, and the league has been open to fresh and new ideas. Working with Kim on the operations side has been a pleasure because she has brought that institutional knowledge from having done All-Star for so many years.

As for what makes this one unique, this is the culmination of everything we've been building towards during the regular season so far. Going back to when we toured All-Star production last year, it has been a long haul, and, even though we still have a long way to go, this is a great moment to see for how far we've come.

How did you manage staffing when NBC had the All-Star Game, Super Bowl, and Olympics all happening in the same time frame?

Titone: Part of what we do is wrangling all the information and making sure everybody knows where everyone's going to be. That sounds like a very simple thing, but, when there are so many moving parts, it can get very complicated. People simply can't be in multiple places at once. And it gets really hard with great technicians because you want them on everything - Olympics, Super Bowl, and All-Star - but that's just not possible. We had to come together with all the different production teams and figure out what made sense from a big-picture perspective.

Soucy: We all worked together as a team to make sure the decisions made sense for everybody holistically. I think getting through this crazy month prepares us for what's going to be an even crazier part of the season, which is NBA Playoffs.

What was one of the more unexpected challenges that you faced with NBA All-Star?

Soucy: The HBCU Game was definitely interesting. We have a partnership with ESPN for the HBCU Game at the Kia Forum, which aired on ESPN2, NBA TV, and Peacock. Typically, the Celebrity Game happens on one day and the HBCU Game on the next, but, for the first time, they were on the same night this year. We worked very closely with ESPN to get it done. ESPN brought in all the facilities and the crew, and we built in time in the schedule on Thursday for our team to get in there and build the show.

What about the Courtside Live cameras? How did that develop and did it get greenlit?

Soucy: [The NBA broadcast department] never immediately says no; they say, Let's figure this out. They want us to be able to make these kinds of new ideas happen. Right from the first time we brought out the idea during bootcamp, they were coming up with ideas, and our teams were working together to make it happen.

Titone: In July at that bootcamp at Chase Center in Golden State, they were tremendous partners. [NBA SVP, Broadcasting] Paul Benedict and [Senior Director, Broadcasting] Dana Jones gave us free rein. We had no fans for a few events, and that helped us. Then the fans came for another event. Going into the season with a couple preseason games on Oct. 7, 14, and 21, we were ready to roll.

Supracam is another notable addition at All-Star. How do you determine when to deploy it?

Soucy: We also brought Supracam out here to Intuit for our last game before All-Star, which was awesome - especially with the halo in this building. We had a few different plans of how Supra wanted to rig here, and, eventually, they rigged within the halo. The venue was incredibly accommodating both with the different surveys we had to do and with allowing Supra to come in even on a regular-season game so that we could get that research in before All-Star.

How has the crew composition evolved for NBC's NBA coverage?

Titone: We have a lot of technicians who have worked on the sport for other networks and also had worked for NBC previously, so a lot of familiar faces for the crew and for the NBA, too. We have a lot of the same robo operators or handheld operators we know. There are some new people too, who are also excellent. It has been cool to see the team come together from different components.

Soucy: We didn't say, Only NBC people allowed ; we opened it up to the wider group of folks that have done NBA over the years. [NBA on NBC Director] Pierre Moosa did a great job of welcoming new people starting in the spring. We have so many games on our schedule, you can't have just specific people. With five

LINK:	https://www.sportsvideo.org/2026/02/15/live-from-nba-all-star-2026-nbc...
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