An aspect you don’t touch on is that familiarity is really valuable. Literally nobody tends to like new play-by-play until they reach a point where their voice starts to become familiar, and announcers tend to hold their jobs for a very long time. So any change is going to come very slowly. Nobody is going to replace a well-liked, longtime play-by-play guy for a new, unfamiliar one unless they need to. So turnover in this industry is really, really slow.

And it’s not a skill you can just step into, you need to have experience at it in the minor-leagues or other sports. But minor-league gigs tend to not pay well-enough to be a full-time job, so you have people who split their time between multiple minor-league teams and other broadcast gigs. Minor league teams generally don’t have the luxury of trying different voices or letting an inexperienced commentator take time to learn the ropes. A lot of these guys have experience doing play-by-play for their university teams in one sport or another.

So to address that, you have to get right down to the roots: are sports broadcast journalism programs fair in their admissions? The journalism school I went to in Canada was probably about 65% white overall, but the sports broadcast journalism stream was almost exclusively white male, and I’d wager that’s overwhelmingly the largest applicant group for US colleges as well. And there’s all the complexity that is the debate over affirmative action in the US.

But then how are university sports programs choosing who gets the plum gigs of doing the college sports play-by-play, which are the best way to break into the industry? And is it fair to do anything other than a meritocracy at this point? And how do g-league and other minor-league teams handle choose their broadcast teams, and is it fair to require them to risk what precious little radio/TV viewership they have for experimenting with other voices? If so, who decides which g-league teams have to exercise this sort of affirmative action? And if you can manage all of that so that there’s an actual pool of diverse candidates with quality abilities and experience, how does the NBA tell networks that they need to make certain hiring choices, when ultimately the NBA works in service of the networks to allow the networks to create the product that the networks feel is going to work for their audience?

In short, I don’t think it’s a solvable problem, especially when a lot of people seem fine with the black colour-commentator as a workable solution. It’s certainly not solveable on a scale other than decades, and who knows what nba broadcasting is going to look like by then… you’ll probably be able to have your favorite ai personality do entirely believable custom play-by-play with the personality you want before that point, customized how you want. Sexy korean girlfriend voice who gives you whatever the popular advanced stat of the 2050s is in actual conversation, can give you parlay tips and place them for you, and spends time-outs telling you about her day (including a suspicious number of mentions of mountain dew)? Yeah, that’s probably closer in the future than a big change in the racial ratio of play-by-play announcers.