NBC Sports Philadelphia is budgeting so as to add a courtside voice to its Sixers broadcasts forward of LeBron James‘s arrival this season, community vp of content material Alexandra Matcham informed the Philadelphia Inquirer.
“I think you need a voice on the court where Alaa [Abdelnaby] and Kate [Scott] can’t be to give us insight, do pre- and postgame interviews, analysis, all of that,” Matcham said. “It’s a very hard job to do.”
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For years, NBC Sports Philadelphia and its predecessor, Comcast SportsWeb, used reporters like Serena Winters and Taryn Hatcher to fill that type of position for the Sixers. That stopped in 2020, when the community started eliminating in-arena and in-game reporting jobs throughout its properties as basketball and hockey seasons wrapped that 12 months, according to Crossing Broad’s Kevin Kinkead. Hatcher stayed on masking the Phillies for 5 extra seasons after that before her contract lapsed at the end of 2025 and NBC Sports Philadelphia reduce the place relatively than renew it. Kinkead later reported that the community and Hatcher had mentioned a contract association that may have let her tackle different work on the similar time, however the talks ended with out an settlement over what Kinkead’s sources described as a normal contract disagreement, not any actual battle between the 2 sides.
That left NBC Sports Philadelphia with out anybody in that position for everything of the Sixers’ 2025-26 season, and the roster now taking form offers the community far much less room to go one other 12 months with out one.
“If you get a generational talent on your team, it could easily become a situation where the people that work for us are burnt out by December, and you don’t want that,” Matcham mentioned. “You need extra help.”
The form of the brand new position hasn’t been determined, and Matcham mentioned she’s been deliberate about not defaulting to the title NBC Sports Philadelphia has used for that type of place up to now. The community reduce its final remaining in-arena reporting jobs throughout its properties, together with the Sixers, beginning in 2020, and no matter will get added again now will not merely be a return to that outdated mannequin.
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“As I’m talking to my colleagues, I’m not even calling it a reporter role because I feel like it’s going to give them a stereotype I don’t necessarily mean,” Matcham mentioned.
Among the choices Matcham described is bypassing a generalist Sixers reporter altogether in favor of somebody employed particularly for James’s orbit, somebody with an present relationship constructed from prior protection of him relatively than of the staff broadly.
The Scott-Abdelnaby broadcast completed twenty ninth out of 30 groups in AA’s 2025-26 local NBA announcer rankings, the third straight season in that spot. The commonest grade followers gave them was a C, and roughly six in ten voters gave them a passing grade in any respect. Fans praised Scott’s professionalism and criticized Abdelnaby as “too much of a homer.” Several feedback additionally cited the absence of Hatcher as a drag on the published.
Hatcher spent eight years at NBC Sports Philadelphia masking all 4 main Philadelphia groups, most just lately working Phillies residence video games alongside Tom McCarthy and John Kruk, however since her departure has been selective about new roles whereas managing a well being scenario. Matcham defended the choice on the time, telling the Philadelphia Business Journal the community wished “to add to our storytelling in new ways” and that the place was being eradicated.
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Whatever title the community settles on, it will likely be attempting to recreate, beneath completely different phrases, the precise type of presence it determined a 12 months in the past it might do with out.
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