It is not often that announcers suffer season ending injuries. However, it is beginning to look very likely that Bill Walton will miss the NBA Finals this year, thanks to back and hip problems that have kept him off the air for three months.
Fellow ESPN colleague Bill Plaschke recently wrote a piece in the Los Angeles Times detailing what Walton has gone through in recent weeks.
Walton “recently spent much of an entire month lying on the floor of his San Diego home in agony.” His son, the Lakers’ Luke Walton, told Plaschke that Walton went through a period where “he would get up at 5 in the morning, roll over on the floor, and stay there the rest of the day … He couldn’t do anything.”
The loquacious NBA analyst originally suffered the injury after the All Star Break. Luke says his father was “trying to get off the plane from Connecticut but couldn’t stand up.”
Since then, Walton has been off the air, replaced by Jon Barry on ABC’s pregame show. The likelihood now is that Barry will continue as ABC’s studio analyst through the NBA Finals. And considering that Barry was also the studio analyst for last year’s NBA Finals, ESPN/ABC may decide to have some much needed consistency by keeping Barry in that role next season as well.
