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Charles Barkley isn’t hiding his concerns about Inside the NBA making the jump from TNT to ESPN this fall.
The Emmy-winning postgame show will stay on the air despite TNT losing NBA rights, but Barkley admitted he and the crew have questions about what the new setup will look like.
“We have questions. Like normally the number one time on our show is after the game,” he said on Pardon My Take. You get like 45 minutes to shoot he s—. But me and Ernie [Johnson] have talked about it. Like, are we gonna get to do that? Are they gonna say we gotta go to the SportsCenter?
“First of all, it’s an honor to work for ESPN because they’re the biggest sports network in the history of television. But like, when we have those 45 minutes and it’s like one o’clock in the morning and we can just go crazy and it gets weird—but are they gonna say, ‘No guys, y’all got 15 minutes. We gotta go to SportsCenter.’”
The loose, late-night chaos has always been central to the show’s appeal. TNT rarely cut the cast short since it followed games with replays, leaving Barkley, Ernie Johnson, Shaquille O’Neal and Kenny Smith free to riff into the early hours.
ESPN’s more rigid programming lineup is what worries Barkley most.
“Everybody can say right now, ‘Yeah, we gonna leave everything the same,’” Barkley added. “But like if the game ends, is SportsCenter going say, ‘Y’all got 45 minutes to shoot the s—.’ Or, ‘We need to go to SportsCenter in 15 or 20 minutes.’ It’s gonna be a learning curve.”
Barkley isn’t the only one skeptical.
“I think ESPN is gonna f— the show up. I think they’re gonna f— the show up,” Bill Simmons said on his podcast, echoing similar doubts about commercial breaks and time restrictions. “Unless they completely change how they do commercials, the show is gonna to be different and people are going to be pissed. And Barkley and those guys are going to be pissed, and I think it’s gonna go badly.”
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