Zach Lowe has a simple test for a great League Pass broadcast. It\u2019s not just the announcer. It\u2019s the announcer, the team, and the way those two things feed each other.<\/p>\n
By that measure, he and Bill Simmons agreed this season that nobody came close to Charlotte.<\/p>\n
Eric Collins has been the voice of Hornets basketball since 2015. He has called games through every phase of this franchise\u2019s long rebuild, through years when there was genuinely nothing to get excited about, through the arrival of LaMelo Ball in 2020 and the slow, injury-interrupted process of figuring out what this team could actually become.<\/p>\n
When Ball arrived, Collins said pretty plainly<\/a> that calling his games would define his career. This season, with Ball healthy and Charlotte chasing a playoff berth for the first time since 2016, that investment has finally found the stage it deserved. The Hornets run and shoot and throw down alley-oops every night, and Collins sounds like a man who has been waiting a decade for a team this fun to call. That\u2019s what Lowe was getting at.<\/p>\n \u201cLook, we all know who the sort of pet broadcast teams are,\u201d Lowe said. \u201cWe all love the New York broadcast, the Brooklyn broadcast. I love the Toronto broadcast. But the whole experience of Eric Collins just losing his mind 10 times a game for a team that\u2026 You watch the Wizards broadcast, and they\u2019ll lose their mind over Bob Carrington making a mid-range jump shot\u2026 Eric Collins is going crazy for legitimate basketball reasons.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cHe really cares,\u201d Simmons added, \u201cand like somebody will make a shot against them, it\u2019d be two minutes left, they\u2019re down one. And then some f*ck up, and somebody will hit a three against them, and he\u2019ll just say some crazy sentence like, \u2018Oh, isn\u2019t that a chainsaw on the tibia?\u2019 He just has this endless thing of crazy comments. The Hornets are hanging on like a hat on a screen door. He\u2019s a ten out of ten.\u201d<\/p>\n Zach and I tossed some much-deserved love to Charlotte\u2019s broadcast team this season \u2014 led by the great Eric Collins who had a Jokic-like year. I thought Charlotte, Denver and Boston were the 3 best League Pass TV teams this season. pic.twitter.com\/T9Ki0QWF74<\/a><\/p>\n \u2014 Bill Simmons (@BillSimmons) April 6, 2026<\/a><\/p>\n The calls are what most people know Collins for, and there are plenty of them. The clips travel because they\u2019re funny and a little unhinged, and Collins apparently has a bottomless<\/a> supply<\/a> of<\/a> them<\/a>. But that\u2019s not what Lowe was actually getting at. The thing he was praising is something much harder to find. Collins has never once taken that same energy and weaponized it. He doesn\u2019t go after players on the other team. He doesn\u2019t manufacture a villain to make Charlotte look better by comparison. When the Hornets blow a fourth-quarter lead, he sounds like a man who can\u2019t believe what he just watched, not one who is looking around for someone or something to blame it on.<\/p>\n Most local broadcasters who get that loud and that invested eventually tip into something uglier. Not Collins.<\/p>\n \u201cBy the way, note for announcers, a lot of what you\u2019re saying is he\u2019s enthusiastic without being a gratuitous homer,\u201d Lowe said, \u201cand part of that is, unlike some other homers, never hostile to the other team or the opposing players for no reason. Never going out of your way to criticize, sometimes unjustly, somebody on the other team.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cHe is like everything you would ever want from your local play-by-play guy,\u201d Simmons added. \u201cDrew Carter is like this with the Celtics, too. They\u2019re overqualified to be doing the local games, like they\u2019re really national guys.\u201d<\/p>\n The national recognition has been a long time coming. Collins has been doing this in Charlotte since 2015, building a style so distinctive that his calls regularly go viral outside of any basketball context, finding audiences who have never watched a Hornets game in their lives. Prime Video noticed and hired him last summer<\/a> for its inaugural NBA package. Fox gave him his NFL debut in October, calling Dolphins-Panthers<\/a> at the stadium he could have walked to from his front door, and a football audience had the same reaction<\/a> basketball fans \u2014 as well as Steph Curry and LeBron James<\/a> \u2014 have been having for years.<\/p>\n Good on you, Eric Collins. And Dell Curry, too.<\/p>\n \t