Adding Kyle Lowry to NBA coverage continues Prime Video's unusual analyst approach

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Prime Video continues unusual analyst approach with Kyle Lowry hire

National NBA coverage is going to look significantly different this fall, with TNT Sports out (apart from continuing to produce Inside The NBA) and NBC and Amazon in. The latter company made another splash Thursday, announcing the hire of six-time All-Star and current Philadelphia 76ers point guard Kyle Lowry for their NBA on Prime studio show with "select appearances throughout the 2025-26 season with increased responsibilities in the future." And this fits into a larger trend of what Prime Video is doing with their various sports coverage.

Of course, this isn't the first hire of an active player for select appearances. In the NBA alone, TNT Sports featured Draymond Green for most of the last five seasons, including in a more regular role since 2022. (That didn't always work out well thanks to Green often creating controversy, including insults of entire countries and bashing of the games he was covering, but that had more to do with Green and his particular approach than with him being an active player.) In the NFL, Greg Olsen started calling some games for Fox while still playing (prompting debate about team-affiliated figures in production meetings long before that sprung up more recently with Tom Brady), and a variety of current players have made regular appearances on a variety of pregame/halftime/postgame shows. But it's still relatively rare to see, and it adds to a wider element seen across many of Prime Video's sports broadcasts: an emphasis on analysts who only recently left the field, even if they don't have much traditional broadcasting experience.

This is certainly shown in the announced NBA on Prime lineup thus far. That current studio roster includes John Wall, Blake Griffin, Dirk Nowitzki, Steve Nash, Dwyane Wade, Candace Parker and Udonis Haslem, with Swin Cash also appearing as a contributor and Rudy Gay making selected appearances. (It's not entirely clear yet which nights those figures will appear on, and in which combinations, but that's the announced roster.) Of those figures, Wall, Griffin, Haslem, Gay, and Parker last played in 2023 (in the WNBA in Parker's case), while Nowitzki and Wade last played in 2019. Nash (2015) and Cash (2016) are further away from their playing tenures, but have been in recent non-playing NBA roles, with Cash serving as the New Orleans Pelicans' VP of basketball operations and team development for the past six years and Nash serving as head coach of the Brooklyn Nets from 2020 to 2022. That's a lot of recent experience. And it ties into what Amazon has done with their NFL coverage.

Back in September 2022, near the start of Prime Video's first season as the exclusive (well, apart from broadcast TV stations in the teams' markets) home of Thursday Night Football, I wrote a piece on this for Awful Announcing based on comments from their studio show analysts and executives. That studio show launched with host Charissa Thompson, veteran analyst Tony Gonzalez, and two analysts who had played in the NFL the previous season: Ryan Fitzpatrick and Richard Sherman. (Partway through the season but after this piece, Andrew Whitworth, who had also played the previous year, went from a contributor to a regular). Here are some of the key quotes from that piece:

TNF on Prime has continued with that group, and they've found a lot of success with that. And while those figures are now a little further removed from playing than they were in 2022, they still played quite recently compared to many of their colleagues on other networks' pregame shows. Other networks have added some more recent players, including Fox (Rob Gronkowski), CBS (Matt Ryan), and ESPN (Jason Kelce), but the TNF cast still stands out as remarkably young and remarkably close to their playing days. And, as a related part of that, that meant their figures were tabbed for major national pregame show work without a lot of previous broadcasting experience, a contrast to where Gronkowski, Ryan, and Kelce were all at by the time they got to their current roles.

Some of that is a function of Prime Video's sports setup. Unlike many of the linear networks, they tend to have just top-tier national rights, and no non-game studio content. (They do have a lot of documentaries, but not daily talk shows such as ESPN and Fox do; they briefly tried those in 2022, but that approach didn't last long.)That means there's no convenient place for their hires to follow the traditional path of gaining lower-profile broadcasting reps before being thrust into a full national spotlight, as happened for Gronkowski on Fox NFL Kickoff, for Ryan on a lower-down CBS game crew, for many of ESPN's current Monday Night Countdown figures on their talk shows, and even for Kelce on his New Heights podcast with brother Travis.

But, thus far, Amazon has seemed to make savvy hires who can jump quickly into those national studio roles despite not having a great deal of broadcasting experience. That's seen from the TNF on Prime cast through Corey LaJoie and Trevor Bayne (still competing) on NASCAR to Blake Bolden (last played in 2019, still working as a Los Angeles Kings scout) on their Monday Night Hockey NHL broadcasts in Canada. And that raises questions about just how important those traditional lower-down reps are, especially if the tradeoff is that analysts are further removed from the game by the time they make the biggest stage.

On that front, it's perhaps notable that many of the traditional networks seem to be bringing in their own recently-played hires and putting them in more prominent positions more quickly than they had in the past. That may suggest there's some merit to this idea of grabbing recently-retired figures for studio shows. (Of course, it's worth mentioning that there often seems to be a larger hurdle in going quickly from playing to calling games, which comes with a longer time commitment and with a need to quickly react to what's happening in the moment versus the shorter and more set up environment of the studio, and it's significant that Prime Video's lineup of game announcers and analysts features a lot of broadcasting experience.)

Just how well this new NBA cast will work out for Prime Video remains to be seen. The biggest question with studio shows is often chemistry between the cast, and that's hard to project before watching them interact. But the approach Amazon is taking of focusing on recently-retired figures is interesting, and it fits with an overall strategy that's been working for them so far.