ESPN seems fine with Firefox. I clicked on the Shaq link to see what would happen, and the clip played flawlessly.
Came across this on Mozilla's forums that mentions the problem with Safari, as well. There's a link in the Mozilla thread to Apple's site, probably the one you mention, where there's a long thread with the same complaints.What version of OS X are you using? I could be a Leopard specific problem. I research a bit more on the Apple website and found that many others are having the same problem I am having.
For what is worth, I've seen the same issue that seems to be associated with Java. Even with Firefox, although the browser works, the rendering is slow and hesitant. I ran the system maintenance routine including repair permission to see if it would take care of the issue, and to some extent, it did. But the hesitation is still there. I wonder if Apple pushed out a minor update or something these past couple of days. The only thing that I have added this past week is that I re-installed the Mac OS X 10.5.2 combo update. No other changes. So this hesitation that my system seems to be experiencing sort of caught me by surprise.
Update, the issue was ESPN and has been taken care of.
Check out the bottom of this thread. I just went there and all is now fine.
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1431695&tstart=0