‘Stupidest Sh*t Ever!’ Charles Barkley Sounds Off About Future of Inside the NBA — Says Show Won’t Be On ESPN ‘As Much as People Think’
Charles Barkley revealed Monday that Inside the NBA taped a pilot episode for a version of the show which will air on TNT — despite the network losing NBA broadcast rights. Apparently, it wasn’t any good.
With the conclusion of the Eastern Conference Finals on Saturday, TNT’s coverage of the NBA had officially come to an end. Warner Bros. Discovery — TNT’s parent company — lost a bid to retain NBA broadcast rights, beginning next season. Instead, Amazon and NBC will be joining ESPN/ABC as the league’s media partners.
Many basketball fans were disheartened by the news due to the fact that the end of the NBA on TNT also meant the end of the Emmy Award-winning show Inside the NBA. That was until ESPN swooped in and managed to get a deal to air the show. Though ESPN will broadcast it, Inside the NBA will remain a TNT show and will continue to be produced by TNT. The entire cast of Barkley, Shaquille O’Neal, Ernie Johnson, and Kenny Smith will be returning to essentially bring the same show over to ESPN.
But they will also continue to produce a version of the show for TNT. The big problem, though, is that the TNT show cannot use any NBA highlights — which is something of a roadblock for a show about the NBA. Barkley dished on the ill-fated pilot:
PATRICK: OK, but does the show look like the show? It’s just, it’s Inside the NBA but it’s on ESPN. Is that how you’re positioning this?
BARKLEY: Dan, we don’t even know! See, that’s one of the reasons I was waiting like, yeah, I don’t know what we’re doing. And then TNT is trying to do something stupid behind the scenes. We taped the pilot about a month ago, and it was the stupidest shit I’ve ever seen in my life… We’re not gonna be on ESPN as much as people think.
ESPN, of course, has its own established NBA team covering games. Barkley added that the Inside the NBA crew will be part of broadcasts between a “third” and “half” of the time.
Although the first taping for TNT proved to be a disaster, Barkley credited the network for acknowledging that and vowing to correct it.
“We can’t show highlights,” Barkley continued, “so we were sitting there for like an hour and a half taping this pilot; and we were looking at each other: ‘What the hell are we doing?’
“But like I say, I give TNT credit. The first thing they said after the pilot: ‘Yeah, that was really stupid. We got to figure something out.'”
Watch above via The Dan Patrick Show.
CORRECTION 3:10 P.M. ET: A previous version of this post erroneously stated that the pilot Barkley referred to was shot for ESPN. It was actually filmed for TNT. The post has been updated.
