It wasn’t Maria Taylor’s responsibility to fix the situation.
She didn’t do anything wrong and bears no responsibility for the situation. It was on ESPN to fix it and they failed miserably.
Adam Silver was asked about it and he agreed that ESPN dropped the ball.
It’s disheartening. I’m really not in a position to speak too specifically about what goes on at ESPN because so much of my information came from your newspaper’s reporting and others, so I am not privy to much more beyond that. I will say, apropos of my earlier comments, I think it’s particularly unfortunate that two women in the industry are pitted against each other. You know, I know that both Rachel and Maria [Taylor] are terrific at what they do, they work extraordinarily hard. As I said, I think just from the league’s standpoint, while we recognize well, ESPN’s operations are independent of us, I feel we’re all part of a family here in terms of what we do around our sport.
I think part of the problem is, that as I said earlier, when people can’t get in a room and talk through these issues, this seemingly has fostered now for a full year. I mean, this is an incident that happened I guess when Rachel was in the bubble a year ago, and I would have thought that in the past year, maybe through some incredibly difficult conversations, that ESPN would have found a way to be able to work through it. Obviously not.
Again, I hope that the folks at ESPN are able to continue to work through these. We appreciate our partnership with them and the coverage, again from both Rachel and Maria. I mean, they’re incredibly devoted to the NBA. They’re both fantastic at what they do, and this is just a really unfortunate situation, especially coming at this moment in time when we would like all the focus to be on the players on the floor.
In an ironic twist, this might lead to both Taylor and Nichols leaving the company.
Flip the page for video of Nichols’ apology.
