Noah Eagle Talks Courtside, NBA on NBC

Noah Eagle spoke to BIL about his ongoing work with NBC Sports, which is set to broadcast the NBA All-Star Game next month.

NEW YORK—It’s hard to imagine him being anywhere but courtside for some major NBA events but there was indeed such a time where Noah Eagle was clipped.

Speaking at an NBC Sports panel highlighting its “Legendary February” ahead, Eagle detailed an incident from his teenage years where his mother Alisa ran into an old friend as he was trying to get home to watch the 2014 Rising Stars Challenge. The night proved unforgettable … for both then-Detroit Pistons sophomore Andre Drummond and Eagle, who remembered an obstacle-turned-nemesis. 

“All Star Weekend was a holiday every year,” Eagle recalled as he took the stage with fellow Syracuse alum and newly-minted co-worker Carmelo Anthony. “It was the year that Dion Waiters and Tim Hardaway Jr. had that back and forth at the Rising Stars challenge. It was that night, and my mom and I went out to dinner first … and she ran into one of her high school classmates.”

“His name was Lee, he was like, so what are you guys up to? I go the NBA All-Star Weekend. He goes, oh, that’s this weekend, okay, so what’s going on in your school life right now? The Rising Stars Challenge is on tonight, I need to get home!”

Eagle would have plenty to tell Lee in a modern encounter, as the 29-year-old is one of the top play-by-play men for NBC’s return to NBA broadcasting. The Association All-Star Game is one of many duties bestowed to 30 Rock and Eagle will be on the mike for the main event in SoCal on Feb. 15 at Intuit Dome. Almost every bit of All-Star Weekend will return to NBC Sports (which will also broadcast Super Bowl LX and the Winter Olympics next month), which takes over from departed league broadcast partner TNT.

Eagle has made a name for himself with several high-profile narration assignments:, having called tennis at the French Open and basketball the 2024 Summer Olympics under NBC’s umbrella and numerous Brooklyn Net and Los Angeles Clipper games. Holding the second spot in the NBA on NBC’s depth chart behind Mike Tirico, however, is perhaps his most consistent biggest role.

Eagle is one of the fresher faces in NBC’s coverage, which has otherwise heavily featured nostalgia banked during the program’s prior incarnation staged between 1990 and 2002, and spoke about the continued quest to strike a perfect balance in comments to BallIsLife.

“I think one of the great things that we’ve done so far is we’ve really focused on making sure that the game is the star and making sure that we tell the stories of those players, humanizing the players along the way,” Eagle said of his approach and the NBC experience to date. “You just hope that you get good games and you can’t control that. What we can control is making sure we do our due diligence ahead of time, so that we’re asking the coaches good questions to elicit good answers.”

“I have so many stories that I’ve gotten from coaches that I haven’t even had a chance to get in the broadcast yet because they haven’t had time. But there will come a time where I get those teams again, where we can really inform the audience of something that maybe they didn’t know before. So I think that’s really what we’re going to keep trying to do.”

Eagle is at the forefront of one of the NBA on NBC’s newest innovations known as “Courtside Live,” which has been heavily featured during its exclusive streaming showings on Peacock. In such cases, Eagle is left alone at the broadcast table while his color commentators instead assume a seat on or near each team’s bench. The set-up is heavily inspired by the “Inside the Glass” coverage that NBC pioneered during its time broadcasting NHL games.

“Certainly the first one we did, it was an adjustment, because it was just so different. having nobody next to me at the table,” Eagle, well-used to the machinations of an NBA broadcast as the son of television staple Ian, told BIL. “I could see them, but they’re in their own space. They’re trying to focus on the game. They have a small monitor, and so it was a feeling-out process. But I think as we’ve done more each week, we’ve gotten comfortable. It really helps me, especially when I’ve got guys like (color commentators) Robbie Hummel and Austin Rivers. They’re phenomenal broadcasters and so and they know the game so well. You have that combination.”

“What I was taught in Syracuse was that the play-by-play person, their job is to drive the bus, but they have a VIP on the bus,” Eagle continued. “My job is to make sure the VIP gets to where they’re supposed to get to. [But] when I do the on-the-bench broadcast, I’m no longer a bus driver. I’m now the traffic cop. [Hummel and Rivers] are the bus drivers. They switch ships, so to speak, but I’m now just directing, making sure that they stay on the road. It’s their show entirely, and so it’s just a little bit of a different mentality for me, but I’ve had a blast doing it with them.”

Such a set-up has already led to some unique moments beyond the action on the floor: during a December game between the Los Angeles Lakers and Phoenix Suns, Eagle had to inform Hummel, the All-American forward and former Minnesota Timberwolf, that he was seated behind-the-basket next to Austin Butler, the Oscar-nominated star of the 2022 biographical film “Elvis.”

Eagle has been on the broadcast network in recent showings, notably calling the anticipated bout of Oklahoma City and San Antonio on Tuesday night. It stands to reason he’ll likely be on duty for at least one part of a quadruple header NBC will schedule this upcoming Monday for Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

Geoff Magliocchetti is on X @GeoffJMags