The Starters
comedy series about basketball recorded in audio-only and video formats, released as a podcast as well as on the web and television
The Starters was a podcast, blog, and television program that analyzed, and often satirized, the National Basketball Association (NBA). The show was written and hosted by Canadians Tas Melas and Phil Elder (J.E. Skeets), Australian Leigh Ellis and American Trey Kerby. It was shot, edited, and produced by Canadians Jason Doyle and Matt Osten.
The show was broadcast on NBA TV from 2013 to 2019 and was also available on YouTube. They also created and released regular audio-only podcasts.
Prior to joining NBA TV, this podcaster ensemble was known as The Basketball Jones.
The same team, minus Ellis and Osten, now host a daily NBA podcast called No Dunks.
Background
Melas, Skeets, Doyle and Osten met while attending Ryerson University's Radio and Television Arts program in Toronto, Canada from 2001 to 2005.
Melas was the co-host of a talk show on SPIRITlive, Ryerson's Internet radio station, called the "Sports Doctors". Doyle produced the weekly program.
The public source identifies “The Starters” as comedy series about basketball recorded in audio-only and video formats, released as a podcast as well as on the web and television. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Starters, comedy and series.
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Attribution, date and provenance are strongest when supported by the original work, a catalogue record and documented transmission. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 13, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7715775. 1 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 4 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2013, 2019, 2001 and 2005.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Starters” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.