June 23, 2025 2:00 pm EDT
The NBA season ended less than 24 hours ago, but there is no offseason for sports television transactions.
Maria Taylor has been named NBC Sports’ lead NBA and WNBA studio host for the company’s upcoming NBA coverage on NBC and Peacock, an industry source briefed on the move said Monday. NBC Sports will make the news official later Monday.
Taylor will host NBA studio shows on Sunday and Tuesday nights as part of a group that includes Carmelo Anthony and Vince Carter. Taylor will also host select WNBA games on NBC and Peacock when the company begins airing the WNBA in the spring of 2026. (NBC will air the 2026 WNBA semifinals and Finals.)
Along with her new assignments, Taylor signed a multiyear contract extension with the company that will have her working at NBC Sports’ properties deep into the 2020s, the source said.
Neither the NBA and women’s basketball are new terrain for Taylor. During her seven years at ESPN, she hosted NBA Finals coverage, the company’s NBA Countdown show and NCAA Women’s Tournament coverage. She failed to reach a contract extension with ESPN in 2021 and, upon the conclusion of her ESPN deal, she joined NBC Sports.
Since arriving at NBC, Taylor served as the lead host of “Football Night in America,” the “B1G College Countdown” and various roles for NBC’s Olympics coverage, including as a late-night host for the recent Paris Games.
Both Amazon and NBCUniversal have been acquiring and assigning on-air talent for their upcoming NBA coverage following the NBA renewing its partnership with ESPN/ABC and forming new agreements with NBCU and Amazon as part of a combined $77 billion deal which starts with the 2025-26 season and runs through the 2035-36 season.
As part of the new rights deal, NBC and Peacock will present national coverage of regional doubleheaders on Tuesday nights beginning in October. Upon the conclusion of “Sunday Night Football,” NBC Sports will launch Sunday Night Basketball across NBC and Peacock, debuting Feb. 1. Peacock will also livestream exclusive national Monday night games starting this fall.
The company will air six conference finals, the NBA All-Star Game and All-Star Saturday night as part of its NBA deal.
“We hope to have a fantastic studio show and studio talent around what we see as the game of the week and we will use our team appearances working closely with the NBA on making it the best matchup that we possibly can have at that point of the season,” NBC Sports president Rick Cordella previously told The Athletic. “We’ve obviously had a lot of success on ‘Sunday Night Football.’ I’d love to say someone had a eureka moment coming up with the idea for ‘Sunday Night Basketball’ but I think it was just natural to us at NBC Sports that this would be a franchise we wanted to create outside of football season. Certainly we have a (broadcast) window open there (after the NFL season). We pitched it to the NBA and it’s an easy to understand concept.”
As far as game coverage, NBC Sports hired Jamal Crawford and Reggie Miller as game analysts to join play-by-play hosts Mike Tirico and Noah Eagle. During NBCUniversal’s upfront presentation to advertisers at Radio City Music Hall in New York City last May, the company announced that Michael Jordan would serve in a “special contributor” role. They also hired coordinating producer Frank DiGraci, who helped make the YES Network the gold standard for NBA regional broadcasts.
(Photo: Nick Cammett / Diamond Images via Getty Images)
Richard Deitsch is a media reporter for The Athletic. He previously worked for 20 years for Sports Illustrated, where he covered seven Olympic Games, multiple NCAA championships and U.S. Open tennis. Richard also hosts a weekly sports media podcast. Follow Richard on Twitter @richarddeitsch
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