The Sixers Added LeBron. Their TV Booth Entered This Season With Three Straight 29th-Place Poll Finishes.

The rankings are Awful Announcing's reader poll, a self-selected vote across all 30 league booths, and not a survey of Sixers fans. The Sixers booth drew 467 votes in 2023-24 and 399 in 2024-25; Awful Announcing did not publish a 2025-26 count (about 11,000 across all 30 booths). Scores use the scale from Awful Announcing's 2024-25 methodology, applied to all three years. Comments quoted are the ones Awful Announcing published. This piece does not describe how any on-air call sounds, because none are documented in the sources below; it argues from the poll, published comments, public interviews and the network's own announcements. Record and roster are as of Nov. 5, 2026, after the Sixers' 112-106 win at Detroit (8-1). Times are Eastern. Opinion is labeled as opinion.

Fan question: What do three straight 29th-place finishes in Awful Announcing's reader poll tell us about the Sixers booth, and what can't they tell us about this upgraded team?

Evidence: 29th of 30 three years running, with scores of 1.34, 1.60 and 1.77; the league average also rose, from 2.31 to 2.44; the 2025-26 poll was published in May, before LeBron James signed in July; play-by-play is the one chair that differs from the two 19th-place booths. Sixers are 8-1 through nine games (NBA.com, Basketball-Reference).

Awful Announcing's reader poll has the Sixers local TV booth, Kate Scott on play-by-play and Alaa Abdelnaby on analysis, 29th of 30 for 2025-26. It was 29th the year before. It was 29th the year before that. The question for this piece is why it is still 29th, and the honest first answer is that the poll cannot say yet.

Here is why. The Sixers are 8-1 with a roster that includes LeBron James, Joel Embiid, Jaylen Brown and Tyrese Maxey, after beating Detroit 112-106 on Nov. 4 (NBA.com, Basketball-Reference). James announced on July 24 that he was joining, and the NBA made it official two days later. Awful Announcing's poll ran in May, so it graded the booth next to last season's team, which went 45-37 and lost in the second round. NBA.com's preview calls this the most talented core the Sixers have had around Embiid, then says, "The biggest question is health."

Health is still the question nine games in. Embiid has played 7 of 9, managing right plantar fasciitis and a minutes restriction at times (Inquirer; landofbasketball / season logs). He sat the Oct. 25 loss to Detroit, the second night of a back-to-back. Brown missed the Oct. 30 Knicks win with left patellar tendinopathy and has played since, including 30 points in the Nov. 4 win at Detroit, while saying he is playing through knee, Achilles and calf soreness (Inquirer). LeBron missed the Oct. 24 Bucks game with sciatica management (6abc) and sat Oct. 31 at Charlotte with low-back / sciatica management before returning Nov. 2 against Chicago (Covers, Inquirer). So several of the nine games were played without the full core. The booth has still not been graded with this roster.

What the poll does show is how stubborn the rank is. Readers grade each booth A through F, and Awful Announcing turns the grades into a score out of four. The Sixers went from 1.34 to 1.60 to 1.77, so the trend is up. The league average rose too, from 2.31 in 2024-25 to 2.44 this year, so the Sixers' 0.17 gain came with a 0.13 gain across the league. The rank did not move. The Bucks in 28th were at 1.82, five hundredths ahead. The most common Sixers grade was a C, at 33.9 percent, and 61.3 percent of the votes were an A, B or C. That is a bunched, middling bottom of the league, and not a unanimous verdict. Nothing in this data says Sixers fans dislike Kate Scott, and I am not writing that they do.

The poll is a reader vote, and what its comments show is a split. Awful Announcing said the comments showed "deeply polarizing feelings about the broadcast." In its summary, supporters credit Scott's professionalism and her "overcoming a tough Philly crowd," while critics find the style "exhausting" and overly biased. In the 2024-25 comments, one voter wrote that "Kate Scott is a star," another that "Kate has come along nicely," and another that listening to Kate is exhausting. The booth collected 46 A grades out of 399 votes that year, about 11.5 percent. That is a minority of voters, but it is a real group that gave the booth the top grade. The criticism also reached the other chair. One voter called Abdelnaby "too much of a homer," another wrote, "Alaa is the best in the business," and some questioned the chemistry between the two. The 2026 write-up says some praised Tom McGinnis's "radio-style" play-by-play when he is on the call. These are fan reactions. They show how some voters reacted, and they cannot say how many fans agree.

Is it the booth, the team, or the poll? The record lets me narrow it, not settle it. Abdelnaby was named analyst in October 2015 and sat next to Marc Zumoff in the 2016 and 2020 polls, when the Sixers were 19th both times. He sits next to Scott in the last three. Play-by-play is the only chair that changed between the 19th-place booths and the 29th-place ones. That may not be the reason, because the roster, the voters and the quality of the team all changed too, and one 2024-25 voter wrote, "Even the commentators don't want to watch them." Opinion: a booth poll is partly a poll about the team in front of the booth, and the two do not separate.

Scott has a real case. NBC Sports Philadelphia picked her from about 80 candidates, narrowed to 15, according to Rob Tornoe's Oct. 20, 2021 story in the Inquirer, and she had already called Olympic basketball in Tokyo. Following someone who had been in the living room for 27 years would have been rough for anyone. Scott recalled thinking, when Zumoff retired, "whoever tries to follow him is an idiot." Twenty-ninth is a crowded room, and the Bucks, who fell from 26th to 28th, are in it too. Some of the messages strangers sent Scott when she got here were abusive, by Scott's own account to PhillyVoice in 2022, and none of it belongs near an argument about a broadcast. Everything else in this piece is about the broadcast.

The timeline is the uncomfortable part. Scott called her first regular-season game on Oct. 20, 2021. She has worked five full seasons, and the sixth is nine games old. After five years, a rising 1.77 is still 29th, and "exhausting" is the word some voters used for the style. The network's change this October was on the sideline: Haberstroh, with Amy Fadool on select games. Both main chairs stayed put. Per Rob Tornoe in the Inquirer on Oct. 30, Scott was set to call Game 7 of the WNBA Finals on Saturday, Oct. 31, and Pat McCarthy filled in at Charlotte. That was a scheduling note then, and it is still only a scheduling note. Nobody should read more into the Charlotte game than is there.

One idea I tested along the way: Marc Zumoff understood how to be part of the game without trying to become the game. That is my shorthand, not a quote from anyone, and it does not survive as stated. Zumoff was the Sixers' television play-by-play voice for 27 years, from 1994 until he announced his retirement on June 29, 2021, and he had been with the team 39 years counting his time as a studio host. A month into retirement, WHYY's transcript of his interview with Jennifer Lynn has him describing radio DJs who "somehow stopped talking when the lyrics came in," and having "been guilty of that sometimes." Dan Roche's NBC Sports Philadelphia farewell column leaned on his sayings: "Garbage into gold. Locking all windows and doors. We are running tonight. Hold on, partner, we're coming in for a landing!" And in the two polls Awful Announcing ran in his last years, his booth was 19th in 2016, with a 2.20 and a C as the most common grade at 28.23 percent, and 19th again in 2020, with a 2.25. Awful Announcing said of the 2016 result that it "isn't a bad grade for a new crew," since Abdelnaby was in his first year as analyst. Those polls had different voters in different years, so I would call 19th a direction and not a measurement. But 19th of 30 is the middle of the pack. It is not a golden age, and the sources I can cite do not say how his calls or Scott's sound from week to week.

Scott's own words are the most useful thing I found on the craft. Gina Mizell of the Inquirer reported in March 2023 that Scott keeps a list of Zumoff's phrases bookmarked, and wrote that Scott "may have used the catchphrase too much at the beginning of this season," referring to "Bang, bang, Georges Niang!" Mizell also wrote that Scott now says it "more subtly." In the same story Scott said, "That's not easy, and it's a thing I'm still working on," and "I think having a call like this always helps, if you're smart enough to save it for big moments…" Niang gave it his blessing, and a local shop sells a T-shirt with it. Scott views even critiques from people who find the call "annoying" as "more proof that this city is awesome and I'm so happy to be here." That is a 2023 interview about one phrase, and it says nothing about how the booth sounds now.

What would change the answer: if Awful Announcing runs the poll again and the Sixers booth climbs out of the bottom five with this roster on the floor, I will say time and talent were the fix. If NBC Sports Philadelphia has its own viewer research showing a different picture, I will print it. If a published review with a method behind it shows how the booth handles routine plays versus big ones, I will rewrite the parts that say the poll cannot tell me. Until then, the facts are a score that rose every year, a rank that did not move, and a roster the poll has not yet seen.

Tommy Vale writes about Philadelphia sports for Negadelphia.