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For the first time since 1989, the NBA will not be broadcast on TNT. And while that fact has been clear for some time now, Charles Barkley is still mad about it.
Barkley, the star of TNT's crown jewel, “Inside the NBA,” will still be a part of the league's national television programming. But it will not, of course, be on TNT; instead, he, Ernie Johnson, Kenny Smith, and Shaquille O'Neal will occasionally appear on ESPN as part of a licensing deal in which “Inside” will be produced by TNT's crew but broadcast on ESPN.
The agreement, while helpful in partially justifying Barkley and Co.'s massive deals with Warner Bros. Discovery (TNT's parent company), remains a point of great annoyance for the former NBA star.
“TNT never came to us like grown folks and said, ‘Hey guys, we’re probably going to lose to NBA,' which we could have understood,” Barkley said on the ‘Pardon My Take' podcast. “But I thought they sucked. I told them they sucked. Because there's a way you treat people. Because if they had came to us and said, ‘Hey, you know what? It's a lot of money.' Because, you know, we were paying 1.2 billion dollars a year and it went to 2.5 billion. That's a lot of money for 11 years. If they had said ‘it's not a good deal,' we would have understood. But to let us hear about it — and I'll tell you something really s—-y about it, too: I found out that we got traded to ESPN from ESPN.”
Barkley has been open in his discontent with WBD's leadership, although it has not changed much. “Inside” is still scheduled to become a part of ESPN's NBA programming during the 2025-26 season, and TNT is still trying to come up with how to use Barkley, O'Neal, Johnson, and Smith without having the rights to the NBA. Barkley has said that they filmed an unaired pilot of sorts, which he said went disastrously and was acknowledged as such by the higher-ups in WBD.
The NBA season is set to begin on Oct. 21. “Inside” is expected to be a part of “high-profile” games during the regular season, as well as postseason games.
