The NBA media rights is one of the hot topics in sports talk these days with the future of Inside the NBA being one of the most talked about points of the discussion. Bomani Jones and Domonique Foxworth talked about it on the latest edition of The Right Time with Bomani Jones.
“It doesn’t seem to be official, but we are starting to get the word leaking out that it is possible that Inside the NBA, it might be a wrap on that,” Jones said. “…I don’t fully understand how the money works…but dude this would stink.
“The question is, does Charles come to wherever it is? Because Charles is the engine that makes this thing go. Every broadcasting operation has a personality to it and NBC’s personality is 100% the opposite of Charles Barkley.
Jones and Foxworth talked about what happens if TNT does lose the NBA and Ernie Johnson stays at TNT, does the show work on another network.
“I think the show can exist as it does because of a fairly unique set of conditions and circumstances, but this is the one that I think that gets lost,” he said. “TNT is on cable, for a channel that itself I would argue doesn’t really have a brand/personality…I don’t think of TNT as having a clear, distinct personality… What Inside the NBA became, and when it is really cash money is postgame in the playoffs, that’s when you get your money’s worth out of that show. At which point, it is a late-night show on cable television, which allows you to do a lot more. It allows them to be a lot more loosey-goosey or they can just decide they are going to ignore whatever the games were and talk about everything else…you can do that late night on cable television in a way that I don’t know if you can working for the Tiffany network.”
Jones brought up the time the show talked more about what happened with George Floyd in Minneapolis versus talking about that evening’s basketball games. “You think NBC got the stomach for that, because I don’t,” Jones said to Foxworth.
Jones later added, “I am not sure how many people are willing to do what TNT did, which is to say, ‘we are going to let Charles Barkley steer the ship and we are just going to cross our fingers and hope that nobody notices some of the things that he says.’ You think he can get over on NBC or even on Amazon talking about them big women in San Antonio?
“NBC was a great broadcast partner for the NBA in that era of the world and that era of broadcasting. To me the personality of the NBA is much more of an outlaw-ish, loosey-goosey, counter-cultural sort of thing, which is just the exact opposite of NBC and what they broadcast.”
