Noah Reed almost forgot to speak. This was his “welcome to the league” moment, a highlight destined to break containment and reach the entire basketball community. Soon, Nikola Jokic’s mind-bending pass was circulating across the internet, and with it, Reed’s voice. The new voice of the Nuggets.
So much for their preseason opener being a low-stakes warm-up.
“If you hear it, you don’t hear my voice immediately, the second the pass happens,” he recounted three days later. “Because my jaw dropped.”
After picking it up off the floor, Reed stuck the landing.
“What a pass,” he said as Cam Johnson unleashed a 3-pointer on the receiving end of it. “Oh, yeah! Jokic, cross-court, behind-the-back. Come on!”
Chasing a childhood dream
Reed’s favorite memories on the microphone are the ones with sentimental value. He called his first game at the Rose Bowl last year for FOX and was struck by the lineage of great play-by-play voices that had chronicled the historic venue before him as he entered the press box.
His first Indiana University basketball assignment was especially poignant. When Reed was a young boy in the northeast part of the state, his family would gather to watch IU games together. Reed would inevitably get tired of sitting still, and he would start to reenact both the game and the broadcast on his Little Tikes basketball hoop, doing play-by-play for his own buckets.
“I can’t wait to watch you call an IU game,” his grandfather would say. He died about eight months before Reed fulfilled that prophecy. As he called the game, Reed felt like he was speaking to his grandpa over the cosmic airwaves.
Add Nuggets vs. Jazz (preseason) to the list of all-time favorite work days. The game didn’ count for anything and won’t be remembered for anything except Jokic’s brilliant experiment of a pass. But Reed will remember it for the surreal feeling that overcame him in CU’s gymnasium.
“As I was sitting there and the game tipped off,” he said, “I was thinking to myself, ‘I’m living in the moment of my dream coming true.'”
Reed has wanted this since was his mom alerted him to the fact that he could make a career out of his DIY broadcasts on the Little Tikes hoop. He’s wanted to live this exact life — along for the ride with an NBA team — since college. He has that chance now in Denver, where Altitude TV chose him to succeed Chris Marlowe in calling Nuggets games for the local broadcast alongside Katy Winge.
“Everything I’ve done from choosing which college I went to, to every job that I’ve taken and some jobs that I haven’t taken,” Reed said, “it was with the end goal that I want to be the voice of an NBA team.”
Basketball was religion of the heartland where Reed grew up. He was raised on the Hoosiers and Reggie Miller’s Pacers. He crossed paths with future Nugget Gary Harris on the Indiana high school hoops circuit. He played one year of NCAA ball at Division III Defiance College in Ohio. He was the sharpshooting sixth man on a conference championship-winning team — “you weren’t getting a lot of defense out of me” — but he reconsidered his priorities after that freshman season. Broadcasting was the long-term goal. He transferred to Ball State for it.
During his junior and senior years there, he served as the traveling play-by-play announcer for the women’s basketball team. He fell in love with the idea of being ingrained in one team and the community that surrounds it.
“After I had earned the trust of our coach, he was welcoming me into film sessions and every practice and shootaround that I wanted to go to,” Reed said. “Of course, it takes a lot of time to earn the trust, but then you get to the point where you know these people at a deeper level. … That has been the thing that I’ve craved — getting to be a part of a team and getting to be around the same people all the time and interact with a fan base.”
Versatility leads to opportunity
It’s taken a decade since Ball State for Reed to rediscover that feeling in Denver. His first full-time job out of college was in Bismarck, North Dakota, where hockey was the lifeblood, not basketball. At Ball State, he had learned how to skillfully stumble his way through sports that weren’t familiar to him. His television debut had been calling a field hockey game. Now, he was able to teach himself to enjoy ice hockey.
And soccer. And wrestling. The versatility helped him get the attention of ESPN’s college football hiring manager. Even after he got in the door there, he had to be malleable enough to stray from the most popular sports. For two summers, he called the American Cornhole League championships, which were televised on ESPN8: The Ocho.
“That was a thrill,” Reed said. “They have names for every shot possible and every strategy possible, so it was a lot of homework figuring out what everything was called. And I loved it. It’s the best players in the world who are almost never missing the hole. It’s just one after another, and yet they have a bag in their right hand, a beer in their left hand, and it’s just the most relaxed and chill atmosphere that you can imagine.”
Reed’s mission always remained the same. He moved back to the Indianapolis area in 2022, spent three years with ESPN, then started calling college sports for FOX full-time, while freelancing some Big Ten basketball for NBC on the side. NBA League Pass was usually on his television during his nights off — including plenty of Nuggets games.
He’ll continue to do college football occasionally for FOX when he has time, such as last Saturday when he already happened to be in Boulder for Nuggets training camp. The day before his dream-come-true moment in the gym, he was calling CU’s homecoming loss to Texas Tech on the gridiron. It included a lesson in humility for Reed, who isn’t afraid to admit that mistakes happen sometimes when he’s speaking to a live TV audience for two or three consecutive hours, as much as he might aim for perfection.
In the fourth quarter, CU allowed a punt to bounce all the way down to 2-yard line, where it was downed by Texas Tech. The broadcast went back through the sequence after a commercial break.
“There’s a cut to Coach Prime, and if you read his lips, he says, ‘You need to catch that ball,'” Reed said. “We show that, and I set up our analyst with something along the lines of, ‘If a Hall of Famer and one of the best to ever play this game says you need to catch that ball, you should probably catch that ball.’ Well, the punt return man’s last name was Carter. So I had probably said the name Carter three or four times in that 30-second clip right before the first play of the drive for Colorado.”
The next play was a pick-six, caught in the end zone by Texas Tech’s John Curry. Reed misspoke, identifying the scorer as “John Carter” at first.
“The second it comes out of my mouth, I’m like, oh my goodness, you’ve gotta be kidding me,” Reed said. “Can’t believe I screwed that up. So I wait four or five seconds to let the moment breathe, then I quickly correct it.”
His primary goals on the microphone are authenticity and individuality. Nothing forced, nothing too derivative, as much as he’s become a loving historian of the profession. His biggest mentor in the industry is Jason Benetti, the Detroit Tigers play-by-play man who also calls Sunday Night Baseball for NBC.
“He’s always been willing to help me, to listen to my work, to give me feedback and criticism in how I can improve,” Reed said. “He’s been fantastic for me as a person and as a broadcaster.”
Finding a new home in Denver
No amount of coaching could have prepared Reed for the shock of Jokic’s pass last weekend, though. David Adelman described it Thursday as “one of the best passes ever” after rewatching the tape. Rockets center Alperen Sengun was filmed trying to recreate it on an empty court this week, without three defenders in his way.
Part of Denver’s appeal, to Reed, was knowing he would be the voice behind countless remarkable Jokic moments, for however many years the big man keeps slinging it. Reed came to terms with leaving his home state for the opportunity, moving farther away from his family.
“It took an incredible dream job situation for me to want to leave Indianapolis,” he said. “… This is home for me now, and I hope it’s home for me for the rest of my career.”
But he never expected to be served an instant classic pass so soon. Behind the back? Come on.
“That was genuinely how I felt watching that moment,” he said. “Like, come on, how can somebody do that? That’s unbelievable. … Every time you turn on the TV to watch him, you’re thinking there’s nothing he can possibly do to surprise me, to shock me anymore. I’ve seen it all. And then within a few minutes, something happens that makes you go, ‘This guy is unbelievable.’ And that happened for me in-person.
“Just in general, that’s how I call games. What is coming to my mind is what comes out of my mouth.”
