Rachel Nichols has landed a brand new cope with Showtime after a controversial exit from ESPN final yr.
The community introduced the information in a launch on Friday.
“We're delighted to welcome Rachel Nichols to the Showtime Basketball household,” mentioned Brian Dailey, SVP of sports activities programming & content material at Showtime, in a press release. “Rachel brings unmatched journalistic credibility, nice familiarity with our roster and a piece ethic that can take us to a different stage.”
Added Nichols: “I’ve been so lucky to stay my dream job alongside a number of the greatest journalists within the enterprise for greater than 25 years, and this new improvement cope with Showtime Sports activities offers me my most broad enjoying subject but. They’ve requested me to supply, create and host new sports activities programming throughout platforms, working alongside Corridor of Famers, a number of guys with championship rings and an uber-creative workforce behind the digicam. We’re going to have a lot enjoyable.”
Nichols started her profession in sports activities journalism on the Washington Submit. She joined ESPN in 2004. After a short interlude at CNN and Turner Sports activities that started in 2013, Nichols returned to the ESPN in 2016.
In her newest spherical there, Nichols hosted “The Soar,” a each day NBA program that was usually acclaimed.
Controversy started swirling within the 2020 NBA bubble, although.
Final yr, the New York Occasions revealed that Nichols was surreptitiously recorded by an ESPN worker throughout what Nichols believed to be a personal telephone dialog with Adam Mendelsohn, a longtime advisor of LeBron James and James’ agent Wealthy Paul.
Nichols was upset that her position internet hosting the NBA Countdown studio present had been usurped by Maria Taylor.
“I want Maria Taylor all of the success on the earth — she covers soccer, she covers basketball,” Nichols mentioned on the secretly recorded name in July of 2020. “If you want to give her extra issues to do as a result of you feel stress about your crappy longtime document on range — which, by the way in which, I do know personally from the feminine facet of it — like, go for it. Simply discover it someplace else. You aren't going to seek out it from me or taking my factor away.”
Nichols is white and Taylor is black. The fallout from the telephone name festered behind the scenes for almost a yr, as Nichols sought to apologize however Taylor declined to have a dialog together with her.
After the Occasions printed the decision final July, ESPN eliminated Nichols from its NBA protection. A number of months later, Nichols and the community formally parted methods.
On the time of the parting, The Submit’s Andrew Marchand wrote that the fiasco was a results of “embarrassing, indecisive administration” in any respect layers of ESPN.
Taylor has since left ESPN for NBC Sports activities.
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