If you had this on your 2023-24 NBA season bingo card, we applaud you. Doc Rivers will be the next Milwaukee Bucks head coach.
Or not.
Let us explain. Hours after the 30-13 team shockingly fired Adrian Griffin just 43 games into his tenure, CNN Sports reported that Rivers has been by hired Milwaukee.
Immediately after Griffin was relieved of his duties, reports indicated that Rivers had become the favorite to land the job in Milwaukee. The team was said to be honing in on him from the beginning.
However, something strange happened here. ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski and Shams Charania of The Athletic — the Association’s two-biggest insiders — did not follow up with a confirmation on the report.
Ahead of their coverage of the Los Angeles Lakers and Los Angeles Clippers game, TNT ran with the report from its sister network.
Confirmation still didn’t come from legitimate insiders with others pushing back against the initial report on CNN.
Well north of an hour after the initial report, nothing else had broke on this front. Kevin Draper from the New York Times put out a thread on X showing what might have happened behind the scenes at CNN as they were duped. It’s not great. Read it here.
Essentially, Draper is suggesting that an NBA TV scriptwriter pre-wrote a story about the Milwaukee Bucks hiring Doc Rivers assuming that it would be reported by another outlet. Unfortunately, the report went live.
No one on TNT confirmed the sources about this report before Inside the NBA went live. Hence, why it was aired ahead of the Lakers-Clippers broadcast.
Bleacher Report was the first to report the news on social media. That outlet cited CNN and is owned by TNT.
Sure, Rivers could very well be the next head coach of the Bucks. Things might be trending in that direction. But CNN running a full story on it without confirmation is not a great look. The outlet was certainly dragged for it.