Now that the 2024-25 NBA season is over, the Thunder are NBA Champions and the NBA Draft is almost done, the NBA community turns its attention to the upcoming season and the NBA’s new broadcast partners, NBC and Amazon.
While Amazon is the league’s new streaming partner, the NBA is returning to NBC after 23 years and fans are waxing nostalgic over the reunion.
Since the NBA announced its new 11-year, $75 billion media rights deal, the network partners have been busy filling out their NBA coverage teams.
Earlier this week, NBC announced that Grant Hill and Maria Taylor would be joining its NBA coverage.
Hill, 52, was a 7x NBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist and a Naismith Basketball Hall of Famer (2018). Since retiring from the NBA in 2013, he has gone on to have a successful career in business, philanthropy and sports media.
He has spent over 10 years in broadcasting as a college basketball analyst for TNT and CBS, and now joins NBC as a game analyst for the upcoming season.
“I’m incredibly excited to join NBC Sports as part of their NBA coverage. The NBA has been such a meaningful part of my life, and I’m grateful for the opportunity to continue sharing the game I love with fans across the country,” said Hill in a release. “To be part of NBC’s return to the NBA — a network with such a rich basketball legacy — and its debut on Peacock is truly an honor. I can’t wait to get started this fall.”
He also serves as the managing director of the U.S. men’s national team for USA Basketball, and helped the team win a gold medal at the 2024 Summer Games in Paris.
Taylor is a seasoned sports media personality, having hosted NBA Countdown and the NBA playoffs and Finals coverage for ESPN. Since then, she’s had a successful career with NBC Sports, hosting shows such as Big Ten College Countdown, the network’s primetime college football studio program and the semifinals and finals of the French Open.
She was also part of the broadcast team for the Beijing Games and won an Emmy as part of the broadcast team for the 2024 Summer Games in Paris.
Since 2022, she has been the lead host, and the first full-time female host, of the network’s Football Night in America, which, according to NBC Sports, is the “most-watched studio show in sports.”
Taylor will also serve as a studio host for NBC’s WNBA coverage when it begins play in 2026 on NBC and Peacock.
“I’m deeply honored to be part of NBC Sports’ incredible legacy covering the NBA and to return to the game that first captured my heart, women’s basketball,” said Taylor. “To know that I’ll spend the next five years with my NBC family telling the stories of the Super Bowl, the Olympics, the NBA Playoffs, and the WNBA Finals is more than a dream come true — it’s a full-circle moment.”
