Charles Barkley and the Inside the NBA crew are heading to their new home on ESPN this fall. After TNT lost its NBA broadcast package heading into the 2025 season, an agreement was struck to send the best post-game show on television over to ESPN to make sure it stayed on the air. TNT Sports will continue to produce the show.
What exactly the next iteration of Inside the NBA remains to be seen. While the network has insisted that they don’t plan on changing what is clearly a winning formula, unsurprisingly, there are still some concerns about what the new partnership will look like in practice.
Charles Barkley addressed some of the crew’s biggest concerns while appearing as a guest on Pardon My Take.
“We have questions,” Barkley said when asked about the upcoming move. “Like normally the number one time on our show is after the game. 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.'”
As Barkley noted, much of the beauty of Inside the NBA stems from its chaotic trek into the early hours of the morning following the conclusion of the night’s marquee West Coast matchup. Given that on TNT the end of Inside the NBA was usually followed simply by a replay of that night’s game, rather than new programming, the show rarely faced a hard out in terms of rolling credits.
Barkley acknowledged that ESPN has said they’d be hands off with the show, but added that we won’t really know what that will look like until the season rolls around and the new era of the show is off and running.
“Everybody can say right now, ‘Yeah, we gonna leave everything the same,'” Barkley said. “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’s not alone in his concern. Earlier this summer, former ESPN NBA panelist Bill Simmons said he believes the network will ruin the show, raising much of the same concerns that Barkley did.
"I think ESPN is gonna f--- the show up. I think they're gonna f--- the show up," Simmons said on his podcast. "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."
While the concerns about the show getting the room it needs to breathe are undoubtedly valid, there is some reason to hope that the transition runs relatively smoothly. As Ben Axelrod at Awful Announcing notes, ESPN’s new direct-to-consumer streaming operation is set to be up and running by the time Inside the NBA makes its debut on the network, which could allow for more flexibility when it comes to shows running up against each other and commercial load.
We’ll see how it all plays out in just a few more months.
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as Charles Barkley Opens Up About One Big Concern With ‘Inside the NBA’ Moving to ESPN.
