Opinion | Summer League, a slot machine and a dream: How Amy Audibert worked her way to the peak of NBA broadcasting

In charting an unlikely route to an NBA dream job, a wise Raptor once built a brand on a belief: Bet on yourself, went the mantra.

Amy Audibert can relate. In pursuing her path in the broadcasting arm of the world’s best basketball league, Audibert has more than once been inspired to roll the proverbial dice — or, in this particular case, play the nearest available slot machine. The year was 2017, when Audibert was an up-and-coming broadcaster taking annual networking trips to the NBA Summer League in Las Vegas. If the trips were aimed at making connections in the league and could be spun as smart investments, they were also self-financed. Given that Audibert was at the time propping up her then-fledgling on-air career by working as a server at the casino in her hometown of Niagara Falls, Ont., a job she didn’t give up until 2019, her budget wasn’t exactly unlimited.

“I remember thinking, ‘Do I want to extend my hotel for one more night? Do I even want to keep doing this?’” Audibert said. “I just decided, I’m here in Vegas. I might as well make the best of it. I think I played a slot machine and I think I hit a $400 or $500 spin. And I was like, ‘OK, I’m going to extend my hotel room for a night.’”

It was during that windfall-extended stay in 2017 when she struck up a friendship with members of the Miami Heat broadcasting team, including Jason Jackson, now the Heat’s radio play-by-play voice. Clearly Audibert made an impression. Fast forward most of six years, and Audibert is currently wrapping up her first season working alongside Jackson as the Heat’s radio analyst.

Make no mistake: Audibert travelled anything but a straight line from that moment on the Vegas strip to the multi-year full-time contract she signed last fall with Miami’s NBA team. Audibert did not land an NBA gig in the immediate aftermath of that 2017 summer-league visit. She continued working as an analyst on University of Buffalo men’s and women’s basketball games, staples among a hodgepodge of jobs that over the past decade has also included coaching stints at Brock University and Niagara College. She later gained experience as an analyst with the WNBA’s Atlanta Dream in 2019. And before she spent last season working as a courtside reporter for Raptors games on Sportsnet, she worked the previous season as an analyst with Raptors 905, Toronto’s G-League affiliate.

When an opening emerged on the Heat’s broadcasting lineup last off-season, Jackson said Audibert seemed like a natural fit.

“Only one name came to my mind,” said Jackson, a 19-year veteran of Heat broadcasts.

It helped that Audibert has a considerable Miami connection: She moved to the city at age 17 to play basketball for the University of Miami Hurricanes, a squad she would come to captain by her senior year. It also helped that Audibert had a professional resume more than a decade deep that goes back to her days attending Niagara College’s broadcasting program, from which she graduated in 2012, and that she’d shown a willingness to work whenever she’s asked, building up her skills by commentating on sports outside her comfort zone such as lacrosse, hockey and football.

“She’s shown she’ll go wherever the games are, whatever the sport, whatever the role, not always being the analyst, sometimes being the host, sometimes being the reporter,” Jackson said. “She’s left no one wondering how far she’ll go, how hard she’ll try, or what role she’ll take … What an unlikely story, that in 2017 we meet and then six years later we’re broadcast partners. I don’t think that’s how it usually works. But what an amazing run. She’s been absolutely fantastic. Her acumen is just off the charts.”

Audibert’s first season in Miami hasn’t been without its travails. In December Audibert and her family grieved the death of her father, John. “Big John,” as he was known to friends, was the one who helped instill in Amy and her siblings a deep love of basketball. And while the loss is immense and will long reverberate, Audibert said she takes solace in knowing that last season, when regular Sportsnet analyst Alvin Williams had to miss some games, her dad was watching as she stepped in as analyst alongside Raptors play-by-play voice Matt Devlin.

“My dad was so proud that I was calling games with Matt Devlin,” Audibert said. “Can you even imagine your kid doing that?”

Audibert said she couldn’t imagine herself as an NBA analyst if not for the trail-blazing work of Doris Burke, the Hall of Fame broadcaster who, among her many firsts, essentially ranks as the first woman to establish herself as an elite NBA analyst. If the ranks of women on NBA broadcasts has grown substantially in recent years — two years ago this month Audibert was a studio host as TSN produced the first NBA broadcast with a woman in every on-air role — Audibert said a lot of the credit rests with the enormity of Burke’s talent and work ethic.

“I say this all the time: There’s no way I’d be in my position if Doris Burke wasn’t as excellent as she is,” Audibert said.

A six-foot-two centre as a player, Audibert has point-guard-like instincts in dishing off credit for her success. She cited the unwavering support of her family, and of mentors like Jackson, along with the example set by Sarah Kustok, the Brooklyn Nets broadcaster who in 2017 became the first woman to serve as a full-time analyst for an NBA team’s local TV broadcast, as instrumental in leading to her Miami opportunity.

“If (Burke and Kustok) weren’t so good at their jobs I’m not sure people would listen to (women’s) tapes and look at our resumes,” Audibert said.

If icons and mentors can help, in the end every broadcaster has to stand in front of a microphone and weather the sometimes fickle headwinds of what can be a cutthroat business. And even before that, most, like Audibert, have to make an against-the-odds bet on themselves.

“I have no idea what kept me going at times. This industry is incredibly daunting. Because at the end of the day there’s not a lot of jobs,” Audibert said. “I always say (to aspiring broadcasters), buckle up, because you’re going to go on a roller coaster that’s going to take you all the way to the top, and then maybe all the way to the bottom. Sometimes I just don’t know how I got here. It’s a long time and a lot of work. People are like, ‘Oh, you’re so lucky.’ And I am. But it’s a lot of work.”

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