Grandma Helen’s Attic Edition #125: Sixers and NBA links from around the web

Grandma Helen’s Attic

Grandma Helen’s Attic is a collection of basketball related links, video’s, article excerpts, commentary, interesting tweets, breaking news and the occasional off topic post of funny or topical material (I’ll do my best to stay away from politics).

As long as each edition of this ongoing series gets enough RECS to earn it’s stellar reputation as the Babe Ruth of Fanposts, I will continue to produce new editions. The purpose of monitoring RECs is to gauge continuing interest.

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Previously, on Grandma Helen’s Attic

My favorite piece of content that Grandma Helen shared in the previous edition of GHA (edition #124) was from Rob Tornoe of the Philadelphia Inquirer. In his Jan. 17th article ESPN once again whiffs while airing footage of Philadelphia, Tornoe points out a blemish in the b-roll for ESPN’s presentation of the Sixers-Nets game back on January 15th. In a montage of iconic scenes from around Philadelphia, a shot of the Liberty Bell is included... only it’s not the Liberty Bell. From Tornoe’s article:

While most local Sixers fans watched the game on NBC Sports Philadelphia, those who tuned into ESPN’s broadcast just before tip-off were treated with snappy footage of Philadelphia icons such as the Rocky statue and Boathouse Row (and of course, Geno’s Steaks).

Not surprisingly, producers intended on including a shot of Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell. Unfortunately, what ended up in the montage was a beautiful shot of the Arkansas State Capitol in Little Rock.

It’s easy to see how the mistake was made, considering there is a replica Liberty Bell (missing the crack) on the grounds of the Arkansas State Capitol building.

Tornoe goes on to note other recent errors in other ESPN productions involving Philadelphia. I find this sort of stuff entertaining and now I’ve found myself a new little Spot The Difference game.

But as Tornoe notes, an easy to understand mistake indeed. Footage such as the sort involved in a pregame montage of the city of a home team wouldn’t neccesarily be shot live. Maybe the production team for a program that airs as frequently as the NBA on ESPN doesn’t have the time to run around a city shooting b-roll the day of a game. Instead, they’d pull it from a repository of previously filmed footage or maybe they have a contract to use footage produced by an outside production company, that sort of thing. For us here at Liberty Ballers, we don’t have a photography crew on staff. But we still need lead images for our articles. Fortunately, an agreement with USA Today Sports allows us to use the incredible work produced by their photographers. So when I want to pull an image for an article about Ben Simmons’ monster performance, I don’t head over to Google images. I simply search our database for “Philadelphia 76ers Ben Simmons” and all images tagged “Phildelphia 76ers” and “Ben Simmons” appear. But put yourself in the shoes of a producer, who has never visited the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia, throwing together three seconds of b-roll. You search for “Liberty Bell” and sure enough, a video tagged “Liberty Bell” pops up. The replica Liberty Bell at the Arkansas State Capitol building. (I don’t know if ESPN actually operates that way, but I’d think something pretty similar happened.)