Kenny Beecham and his Numbers on The Board podcast team are poised to lead ESPN’s digital coverage of the 2025 NBA draft. On Wednesday, ESPN and Omaha Productions will present an NBA draft live reaction show across ESPN’s YouTube and Facebook platforms at 7:50 p.m. It will star Beecham and the Numbers on The Board crew of Pierre Andresen, Mike Heard, and Darrick Miller, along with ESPN NBA insider Brian Windhorst.
It’s the latest high-profile play by Beecham, a content creator and entrepreneur, who tends to strike a positive, celebratory tone in his coverage. The longtime Bleacher Report talent cohosted ESPN’s “Hoop Streams” digital pregame show during All-Star weekend. Beecham and his crew interviewed NBA commissioner Adam Silver on their podcast. He co-owns the Enjoy Basketball media platform and boasts 557,000 followers on X/Twitter alone. We spoke with Beecham as he prepared to travel to Bristol for one of his biggest sports media moments. The interview is lightly edited for clarity and length.
Front Office Sports: What storyline are you zeroing in on for the draft?
Kenny Beecham: The No. 1 storyline comes into play with pick No. 3. I feel pretty good about [Cooper Flagg going] No. 1 [to the Mavericks], as everyone else does. On No. 2 [likely Dylan Harper to the Spurs], there hasn’t been any buzz from our understanding about it being moved. So No. 3 [with the 76ers] is where the draft really starts. We keep seeing reports about Ace Bailey. I’m curious to see what the 76ers end up doing. Do they take him? Do they go to VJ Edgecombe? There are rumors they’re trying to trade up. Do they go in a different direction? So I’m curious to see what happens at No. 3.
FOS: What will Kenny Beecham bring to ESPN’s draft coverage that viewers can’t get on the usual telecast?
KB: We did a trial run for the NBA All-Star Celebrity Game. I thought it went really well. They thought it went really well. We had a blast. … Our end goal is to be fun, be knowledgeable, and have some form of content for people who may not want to watch the normal broadcast. … Our entire goal as a show is to make it feel laid-back. I always say our show is friendship packaged as sports coverage. The four of us have been friends for so very long. Sometimes our fans fast-forward through the first 90 minutes to get to the last 30 minutes—where we’re away from basketball and we’re talking about pop culture and our friendship in general. Basically, that is what’s going to be different than the normal coverage. We’re going to have a lot of fun making fun of each other for mispronouncing names. Just what normal people do in these situations with their friends.
We’ll have Brian Windhorst in the studio with us as well. He’s going to bring a level of knowledge that we can’t have. By all accounts by him, and Shams Charania, this is going to be a pretty busy NBA draft, with a lot of transactions. So [Windhorst] will be there to give us firsthand [analysis] if a trade happens. And you’ll get our initial reaction. Again, it will really be like friendship packaged as sports coverage. It seems like we’ve found some sort of market for that.
FOS: So it’s more like an NBA version of ESPN2’s ManningCast of Monday Night Football?
KB: 100 percent.
FOS: Give us your take on Windhorst, who’s a looming free agent at ESPN along with Malika Andrews.
KB: I think he’s done an amazing job. There’s a certain feel in sports coverage nowadays that rubs a lot of normal fans the wrong way. Windy is one of the people who’s pretty traditional, pretty unbiased in a lot of his conversations. I think he just wants to do his best as a journalist. He’s almost one of a kind in 2025. He’s one of the people I really truly respect in sports coverage. So it’s going to be a blast to have him in-studio. Hopefully, we can have him unbutton his top button a little bit. Hopefully, we get him feeling really comfortable so we can get him into the fun and games. But he really does cover the sport in the way that I would if I were in his position.
FOS: We’d love to see Windy with his top button unbuttoned. But to your point, LeBron James and other stars complain NBA media coverage has become too negative. Your take?
KB: I think there has to be a healthy balance about being critical of players in the sport. They’re doing such superhuman types of things that I always get back to talking about how amazing these things are. For instance, a lot of the conversation was about how bad the OKC Thunder played [in Game 6]. But I’m more focused in my coverage about how amazing it is that the Pacers were able to come back from losing the last two games when their star player had a calf injury, and they were able to play this diplomatic brand of basketball where nobody on their team had over 14 shots. So I always steer closer to talking about the greatness that is the sport. If you compare the coverage between us, baseball, NHL, and the NFL, we definitely tend to be more negative than positive. I want to steer closer to the positive.
FOS: How would Mavs fans react if they trade the No. 1 pick?
KB: Oh man! They couldn’t react any worse after trading Luka Dončić [to the Lakers], right? … I have people in my life who denounced their Mavs fandom after the Luka Dončić trade. When they won the lottery, they were like, ‘Maybe I should come back?’ … Cooper did a workout a few days ago, where he was amazing with the Mavericks. So even though it was unprecedented that they traded Luka Dončić, I think there’s close to a zero-percent chance they trade the Cooper Flagg pick. He’s as real as any prospect in recent history.
