Charles Barkley will be staying with Inside The NBA as the TNT-produced show moves to ESPN next season, but that doesn’t mean he’s happy with his current network.
‘The TNT people, they’re stupid,’ Barkley told former ESPN anchor and current radio host Dan Patrick this week.
The popular studio show will appear on ESPN and ABC beginning next season as part of a settlement between Warner Bros. Discovery and the NBA that was announced in November. Warner Bros. Discovery, the parent company of TNT Sports, sued the NBA in New York state court in August after the league declined the company’s matching offer for one of the packages in its new $76 billion media rights deal, which will begin with the 2025-26 season.
Even though Inside the NBA will be on ESPN and ABC, TNT Sports will continue to produce the show. It will air from Atlanta, except when the show goes on the road. The quartet of Barkley, Ernie Johnson Jr., Kenny Smith and Shaquille O’Neal will remain with the show. Barkley signed an extension with Warner Bros. Discovery in August despite the company losing domestic rights to the NBA.
‘I could always have stayed at TNT,’ Barkley told Patrick. ‘But I put in my contract I could get out of there if they lost the NBA.
The problem, as Barkley sees it, was TNT tried to discourage Amazon and NBC from making offers to Barkley as they obtained NBA domestic media rights on the aforementioned 11-year, $76 billion deal.
Barkley will stay with Inside The NBA as the TNT-produced show moves to ESPN next season
‘You know, it’s really funny, the TNT people, they’re stupid,’ he continued. ‘They wrote a cease and desist letter to Amazon and NBC and it really pissed me off. They’re trying to say that they traded my show to ESPN and that’s the same as them keeping it. I’m like, I don’t think that’s the way it works.
‘We were having some heated discussions behind the scenes down in Atlanta,’ Barkley said. ‘They sent a cease and desist letter to NBC and Amazon saying I wasn’t available. I was like, that’s not the way my contract reads.
‘Y’all lost the NBA, if I wanted to leave, I could leave. That’s the bone of contention. They’re like, ‘No, you’re under contract.’ I said, ‘I’ll take my chances in court and I feel really good about my chances in court. Because regardless of what they say, Dan, them trading us to ESPN ain’t the same as us being under contract to TNT.’
Barkley has been a long-time critic of ESPN, its NBA coverage, and the network’s overall atmosphere.
‘Times have changed, Kenny,’ he told Smith in November while discussing reports of the ESPN deal. ‘We gotta go back to kissing ass.’
There are many other changes in the NBA media landscape heading into next season.
Shaquille O’Neal (left), Ernie Johnson (center left), Kenny Smith (center right) and Barkley
Mike Tirico has been officially named as NBC’s lead play-by-play announcer when it begins its coverage of the league in 2025-26.
The move is not a surprise, since many expected that to happen when NBC agreed to an 11-year contract with the NBA last summer. Tirico was part of ESPN and ABC’s coverage of the league until moving to NBC in July 2016. He also called six NBA Finals on ESPN Radio.
According to research from the 506 Sports Archive, Tirico called 313 NBA regular-season and playoff games on ESPN and ABC.
Tirico will have another busy 10-month stretch from September through May 2026. He calls the ‘Sunday Night Football’ package, which will include Super Bowl 60, and will lead NBC’s Olympics coverage as the prime time host of the Milan-Cortina Winter Games.
Tirico will call select games on NBC and Peacock the first half of the season, including the season opener in October.
NBC, which carried NBA games from 1990 through 2002, will have up to 100 regular-season games, including on Sunday night once the NFL season has ended. It will also have games on Tuesday throughout the regular season, while a Monday night doubleheader would be exclusively streamed on Peacock. NBC will also have the All-Star Game and All-Star Saturday Night.
Shaquille O’Neal, 51, and Ernie Johnson, 67, have worked together for around a dozen years
During the playoffs, NBC and/or Peacock will have up to 28 games the first two rounds, with at least half on NBC. It also will carry one of the two conference finals in six of the 11 years of the deal.
With the All-Star Game less than a month away, the hiring cycle for NBC, ESPN/ABC and Prime Video for next season is expected to ramp up.
NBC previously announced that Jamal Crawford will be a game analyst and Frank DiGraci will serve as coordinating producer while Prime Video named Taylor Rooks, Blake Griffin and Dirk Nowitzki to its studio show.
Noah Eagle, who does college football, college basketball and some NFL games, is also expected to be a part of NBC’s coverage even though an announcement has not been made. Jalen Rose is a game analyst for college basketball on NBC/Peacock, but does have NBA studio and analyst experience from his time with ESPN/ABC.
