Jared Greenberg’s rise from the Newark Bears to ‘NBA CrunchTime’

Of all the basketball junkies that approach “NBA CrunchTime” host Jared Greenberg and tell him they love the show, one group that has really stuck out to him is the referees.

“CrunchTime,” which airs on the NBA app on mobile devices and smart TVs, is the “NFL Red Zone” concept applied to basketball, and Greenberg has been hosting it in one form or another for seven years.

The Post caught up with Greenberg, 40, amid the NBA All-Star festivities last weekend in Indianapolis, in a bustling JW Marriott lobby, and every few minutes, someone different would pop over to say hello to him, including former Heat legend Alonzo Mourning.

Greenberg, who is also a sideline reporter for TNT, is getting recognized more and more often now in NBA settings.

He said that a young kid walked up to him and asked him for his autograph at a Lakers-Celtics game in Boston recently and cited his love of “CrunchTime,” and fans ask him all the time for selfies now.

Greenberg made it his “life’s mission” to work in sports media at 15 years old.

At this point, he is not only getting recognized in public, but he also finds it surreal that the sport’s refs are glued to his content.

“You know what’s the group that’s craziest that are into it? It’s the referees,” he said.

“I can’t tell you how many NBA refs have stopped me either at a game, or at the airport or in restaurants. They love it. People don’t realize how much basketball referees watch. For them, it’s the perfect show because they get to watch every game at one time instead of flipping around on League Pass.”

There can be as many as 14 games in one night, meaning there are 28 teams to prepare on.

His “command center” in Atlanta consists of a desk, a tablet, a laptop and two monitors.

In addition to watching all the games, he’s looking at a Slack channel with his researcher and production assistants and checking a website with real-time alerts, such as if a team’s going on a 20-0 run.

On top of that, he then has all his notes and preparation on his laptop, plus he’s keeping up with the chatter on X and has his producer, Bert Bondi, in his ear.

The program strives to air the biggest moments, best finishes, extraordinary individual performances, milestones and gambling implications.

Greenberg said he’s sensitive about not hammering the fans who don’t care about betting too much over the head, but that he’ll bring it up when relevant.

“It’ll be like, ‘That game just hit the over,’ or ‘Hey, it’s a nine-point game with eight seconds left, yeah, Team A is going to win, but Team B may cover,’” he said.

The show has been airing on the NBA app since last season, commercial-free for about two hours, and before that, for about five years, he was doing a version of it on NBA TV.

What began as a few-minute segment later became an hour, and then during the pandemic, there was a seven-hour version of it from 7:00 p.m. ET until the end of the West Coast games.

Greenberg grew up in Mahwah, N.J., and went to college at Hofstra.

He started out his career as a jack of many trades for the since-folded Newark Bears in the Atlantic League, doing radio in addition to helping with the tarp and pulling tickets.

He freelanced at the News 12 Networks in the New York and New Jersey area — as a sports anchor and reporter — and was doing some college basketball play-by-play and sideline reporting.

In 2005, not long out of college, he first got to NBA TV.

Declining to name names, Greenberg still remembers what the man who hired him told him when he showed up for the interview in a suit.

“I sit down in his office and he says to me, ‘You’re in this interview for voiceovers. It’s really cool that you’re wearing a suit, but you’ll never be on TV here,’” Greenberg recalled.

He balanced working at News 12 in Westchester before driving to NBA TV’s former headquarters in Secaucus to narrate highlights for the web.

He eventually became the lead anchor at MSG Varsity, the now-defunct 24-hour high school sports network, in 2009.

Turner Sports hired him full-time in 2012 after the NBA lockout, hosting a show called “The Jump” with former NBAers Brent Barry and Dennis Scott to be produced for social media.

This evolved into NBA TV studio work and sideline reporting work, and then ultimately “CrunchTime.”

A lot of people were gunning for the role of hosting the NBA Red Zone concept, and Greenberg attributes part of the reason he landed the spot to his maniacal preparation.

Unlike his TNT colleague Charles Barkley, who frequently fails in TV bits to name which teams bench players are currently on, Greenberg is confident he can identify every player in the sport.

“When the show starts at 8:30 ET, I’m going to give the fans the energy they deserve because if I were not hosting this show, I would be at home watching these games and as into them on my couch drinking a beer as I would be on the show,” he said.