Charles Barkley has never been one to be silent on anything. Such is the case with the ongoing saga of the future of NBA media rights. Several reports have indicated that there are three media rights packages up for grabs and that Disney/ESPN, Comcast/NBC and Amazon’s Prime Video have secured the rights. This would mean Warner Bros. Discovery/TNT would not retain the rights they have been a part of for the last 40 years. Shaquille O’Neal and Kenny Smith are apparently toeing the company line a bit more than Barkley.
A story by Tania Ganguli in the New York Times suggests that while Barkley is still talking, Shaquille O’Neal told her, “We aren’t allowed to talk ever since Chuck’s outburst.”
Ganguli wrote that she ended up talking with Barkley in an elevator after Game 3 of the Western Conference final and that other TNT personnel were in the elevator as well and not at all comfortable with Barkley talking to a reporter. Kenny Smith was among those in the elevator and according to Ganguli verbalized his uneasiness.
Barkley was recently on The Dan Patrick Show and said, “Morale sucks – plain and simple. I just feel so bad for the people I work with, Dan. These people have families, and I just feel really bad for them right now, these people I work with. They screwed this thing up clearly. We don’t have zero idea what’s going to happen. I don’t feel good – I’m not going to lie – especially when they came out yesterday and said, ‘We bought college football.’ I was like, ‘Oh damn, they could have used that money to buy the NBA.’”
Barkley went a step further and said, “My two favorite wines are Inglewood and Opus, and these clowns I work for, they’ve turned us into Ripple and Boone’s Farm and Thunderbird. We’ve got the best studio show. It’s so funny – we just won the [Sports Emmy for] ‘Best Studio Show’ – but these fools turn us from Inglenook and Opus into damn Boone’s Farm and Ripple. It’s crazy.”
Since news first came out that TNT may be on the outside looking in, Barkley has been consistent in talking about how badly he feels for the staff of Inside the NBA, who do not know where their paycheck may come from after next season.
“When we merged, that’s the first thing our boss said [was] ‘We don’t need the NBA,’” Barkley explained to Patrick. “Well, he don’t need it, but the rest of the people – me, Kenny, Shaq and Ernie and the people who work there – we need it, so it just sucks right now.”
