Kenny Beecham still remembers the exact day he fell in love with the Chicago Bulls.
April 15, 2003.
To set the scene: It’s the last game of the regular season. The Bulls are playing host to the Philadelphia 76ers, who are about to attempt another run to the NBA Finals. Allen Iverson is defending his title as, perhaps, the coolest hooper on the planet after winning MVP the year before. The Bulls, in comparison, dropped out of playoff contention weeks earlier.
Enter a young Jamal Crawford.
In his second year as a Bull, Crawford carried himself with an unburdened swagger that captivated a 7-year-old Beecham at home in his living room on the West Side. That carefree aggression was on full display midway through the second quarter, when Crawford swung the ball behind his back — first with the right hand, then with the left — to shake off his defender.
At the time, Beecham — and the rest of the NBA fans — had no idea this “shake-and-bake” move would come to define Crawford’s 20-year career. In April 2003, Beecham simply thought it was the coolest thing he had ever seen.
The Bulls won 115-106. They also won the lifelong fandom of Beecham, who learned through the course of the game how basketball can, at its best, transform into something akin to religion.
Two decades later, Beecham is a familiar face in the NBA. His podcasts “Numbers on the Board” and “Small Ball with Kenny Beecham” command the viewership of hundreds of thousands of NBA fans. At the start of the season, NBC announced a partnership with Beecham’s entertainment company, Enjoy Basketball, to platform three podcasts as part of the network’s return to NBA rights ownership.
Kenny Beecham poses for a portrait on the set of “Small Ball with Kenny Beecham” at Enjoy Basketball in Oak Brook on Tuesday, Nov. 11, 2025. (Talia Sprague/for the Chicago Tribune)
And two decades after that game, Beecham found himself sitting across from Crawford during media day for NBC, waiting to ask the retired star everything about that game that he wanted to know as a 7-year-old. Crawford greeted the questions eagerly, letting Beecham in on a little-known anecdote — he took the ball home from the United Center that night, slept with it tucked to his chest.
Beecham represents a new type of success story in sports media — an independent content creator who built a platform through video content. But in that moment, he was just a kid from Chicago, reliving the first night of his life as a Bulls fan.
“A lot of people, when they get to the point where they’re covering the sport nationally, they lose their fandom,” Beecham told the Tribune. “But it’s important to me to do that. I buy completely into my fandom. It’s part of my identity as a creator to always follow the Bulls regardless of the talent that’s on the court.
“And it is one thing that I will make sure that I’ll never end up losing because, before I was a creator, I was a Bulls fan.”
Beecham made his first YouTube video when he was 13 after asking his dad for a Dazzle video recorder to capture game-play footage off his XBox 360. At the time, his only aspiration was to create YouTube videos for fun — but that quickly expanded as Beecham became comfortable with the medium and drew a larger viewership.
In 2017, the YouTube “Ad Apocalypse” shifted the landscape of streaming, forcing many creators away from the platform. At the time, Beecham decided to diversify by creating more sit-down analysis content and starting a podcast, “Numbers on the Board.”
Beecham didn’t want to start a podcast with other content creators. Instead, he pitched the concept to a group chat of friends from high school who already spent every day dissecting NBA games. Eight years later, “Numbers on the Board” draws 178,000 subscribers on YouTube and is a centerpiece property of the deal with NBC.
“We were all learning on the fly,” Beecham said. “I went from being on-camera talent to being the producer to being the guy that was creating the run of shows and buying all the equipment to at this point now being with NBC. I feel like I’ve lived through so many different setups since I was 13 to get to this point now, and I feel like every single one of them has been really important.”
Pierre Andresen and Darrick Miller, top, from left, and Kenny Beecham and Michael Heard, bottom, from left, pose for a portrait after filming an episode of “Numbers on the Board” at Enjoy Basketball in Oak Brook on Tuesday, Nov. 11, 2025. (Talia Sprague/for the Chicago Tribune)
NBC’s offer to fold Enjoy Basketball into its larger portfolio of NBA content reflects a shift across the sports media landscape to diversify offerings of nongame content.
Leagues are attempting to lower the average age of their viewers, but younger generations don’t consume content through traditional platforms such as cable TV. Both the NFL and NBA have adjusted their approach in recent seasons to address this reality, hiring Twitch streamers and YouTube creators to bridge the gap in their content portfolio.
“It’s really, really huge to try to convince the younger demographic that watching basketball games is worth it,” Beecham said. “That is a message that I’ve preached for years. We could all watch highlights — and there’s value in highlights — but there’s nothing better than sitting down and watching a full game.”
Beecham credits his loyal Bulls fandom for helping him better analyze the good and — too often for his taste — bad of the NBA. During down seasons, Beecham didn’t turn away from the Bulls. Instead, he spent his time trying to ask and answer big-picture questions: Is Kris Dunn a real NBA player? Will Lauri Markkanen be worth a No. 7 pick? Is Wendell Carter Jr. poised to be an NBA center when he’s undersized?
To find a foothold in the NBA space, Beecham learned there are levels to fandom — especially in a league in which teams play 82 games a season.
Some fans want to catch a game or two every week. Others spend their evenings with NBA League Pass in multiview mode, scrolling through sites such as Cleaning The Glass to devour analytics in real time. Many exist in the space in between. And Beecham believes no version of fandom is worth more than another.
“In order to be relatively successful in this space, you can’t shoo off either side,” he said. “You can’t be strictly analytical. You can’t just rely on, ‘Hey, that brother can ball.’ You have to find some middle ground.”
Beecham hopes the partnership with NBC is just the beginning of a new chapter in his career.
The NBA and its media rights partners continue to devote increased resources toward content creator affiliations. And Beecham is open to any opportunity to talk about basketball at the highest level — even if that means hopping on the desk one day.
“Look, if somebody were to call in sick, I’m one small flight away from Connecticut to get there,” he joked.
But for now, Beecham is savoring the current opportunity — using his heightened platform to show fans new and old how to love basketball a little more.
“It’s been a long time coming,” he said. “And it feels right.”
https://www.chicagotribune.com/2025/11/26/kenny-beecham-chicago-bulls-nba-podcasts/
