Malika Andrews to Become First Women to Host NBA Draft

ESPN NBA anchor Malika Andrews will host the 2022 NBA draft, and in doing so, she’ll become the first woman ever to host the prestigious event.

Andrews, who made her first NBA draft appearance as a green room and telecast reporter in 2020, hosted the NBA Draft Lottery for ESPN in May.

“I am so excited to be the host of the 2022 NBA draft,” Andrews said in May per ESPN PR. “It’s really kind of beyond words. We just finished the draft lottery, and I feel like that great training, maybe, hopefully for the draft. But, at the end of the day, I know I have a great team behind me.”

The 27-year-old Andrews received a sports Emmy for Emerging On-Air Talent in May and was listed on Forbes’ 30 under 30 sports list in 2021 for “advocating internally at ESPN for more nuanced coverage of race and gender topics.”

“My credentials are in asking questions, in pushing people to explore themselves, to reflect, to examine something and potentially change or think about it differently,” Andrews told SLAM last year. “And that’s what I’m good at. That’s how I approach my job now.”

Andrews will host the 2022 NBA draft for the first time alongside Jay Bilas, Kendrick Perkins, Adrian Wojnarowski, and Bobby Marks from the Barclays Center in Brooklyn. The draft begins Thursday at 8 p.m. on ESPN.

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