Delay depends on the technology used, but is pretty insignificant to the home viewer because signal flow will always add some, some is added at the carrier, and for anything with a censor there is a delay added for that. IOW fans watching on TV were never reacting truly ”live” compared to what fans at the venue were seeing so adding in a step for commentary either from home (but keep in mind we would not “pass” the signal through anyone’s home studio, that would add a very volatile point of failure, we are integrating their audio at some production point) or at a production point is not really detrimental to the broadcast and is short. I‘m guessing for the Blazers they will be at a studio in Portland, not at home.
These workflows were necessary when traveling sports came back post-covid because of interstate regulations and for the most part are great because yeah, they cost less and allow for more permanent workflows. I assume it’s less of a “the Blazers are cheap” thing and more a way to consider that it isn’t the best use of time or money to keep sending commentators on road trips when the money could be spent to improve the product in another way. Basketball is tricky because they are right there but for sports like baseball and football with booths the commentators are practically watching the games on monitors already (of note Costas and Smoltz have done MLB Network commentary for their games from Secaucus, NJ, they don’t travel to venues). For the business anywhere we can cut costs and create better workflows creates an opportunity to broadcast more events, A-list stuff like the NFL will still get all the bells and whistles but we can broadcast live say, high school sports now for a very low cost when years ago that was too expensive to be feasible. Keep in mind the transition to streaming has been expensive for legacy broadcasters and a future transition to say, 4K HDR will be really expensive too, so choices like this can advance the timeline for that.
Pre-covid one innovation that was already gaining steam was remote productions, or REMIs, where video and audio can be sent sent via IP to a production facility (ESPN has one in Charlotte for example) instead of a production truck with a satellite uplink so on a technical level doing commentary from a production facility instead of from the venue is trivial for a REMI.