Zach Lowe and Bill Simmons are joining forces once again.
Lowe, the former ESPN NBA reporter, is joining The Ringer, Simmons announced on his podcast Sunday night.
“Zach is one of the best people I’ve ever worked with,” Simmons said, “and I was really hoping at some point in life we would get to work together again. So it’s happening.”
Simmons said Lowe’s new Ringer podcast, which is called “The Zach Lowe Show,” will launch next week and mentioned an upcoming Ringer column on NBA awards before the end of the regular season.
Lowe was hired by Grantland, Simmons’ former collaboration with ESPN, in 2011 and became one of its biggest stars. He established himself as one of the top long-form voices in the NBA and his Lowe Post podcast was among ESPN’s most popular.
After Simmons left ESPN in 2015, Lowe stayed and regularly appeared on its daily programming as an NBA analyst while writing a weekly column on 10 things he did and didn’t like around the league.
Lowe was laid off by ESPN in September with one year left on his contract as part of a wave that included Robert Griffin III and Sam Ponder, among other prominent employees. Since being let go by ESPN, Lowe has also been linked to multiple NBA media partners in light of the league’s new rights deal, including Amazon and NBC.
Lowe is The Ringer’s first big hire since Simmons re-signed with Spotify, which owns the site, on a new contract earlier this year. The YouTube page of Lowe’s new podcast already has about 12,000 subscribers as of Monday morning.
