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Millions of people experienced a moment of temporary panic when an earthquake struck Los Angeles on Monday, but ESPN reporter Malika Andrews was impressively unfazed based on how she reacted after it rudely interrupted an interview she was conducting with Rebecca Lobo.
Malika Andrews was only 22 years old when ESPN hired her to cover the NBA in 2018, and she didn’t waste much time working her way up the ranks before making her on-air debut as a reporter in The Bubble during the pandemic en route to cementing herself as one of the network’s rising young talents.
In 2021, Andrews relocated from New York City (where she’d been covering the Nets and the Knicks) and moved to Los Angeles as part of the programming shake-up that led to ESPN replacing The Jump with NBA Today, the program she’s helmed ever since alongside Kendrick Perkins, Chiney Ogwumike, and Richard Jefferson.
Los Angeles has historically been a hot spot for earthquakes thanks to its vicinity to the San Andreas Fault and other smaller underground rifts in the area, and anyone who resides there for an extended period knows they’re going to end up dealing with some unexpected tremors with a relative amount of regularity.
On Monday, that reality was once again confirmed courtesy of the 4.4 magnitude earthquake with an epicenter in El Sereno that struck Los Angeles while alarming millions of people in the process—including Andrews, who was midway through an interview with Rebecca Lobo when the ESPN studio that’s home to the NBA Today set started shaking.
ESPN Los Angeles studio shaking from an earthquake during NBA Today and Malika Andrews handled it like a pro. pic.twitter.com/KPGndlCx01
— Awful Announcing (@awfulannouncing) August 12, 2024
Andrews proved why she’s become of fixture of The Worldwide Leader’s NBA coverage, as she quickly made Lobo and viewers aware of the situation before checking to make sure the rest of the production team was OK prior to continuing with the interview like the earthquake never happened.
I can’t tell you how I would’ve reacted in that situation, but it definitely would not have been as seamless as that (and probably would’ve involved a few more expletives).