Without ogling its existing contract with the NBA (and it’s a safe bet we won’t be getting a look anytime soon), it’s impossible to know whether Warner Bros. Discovery actually has the mortal-lock ability to simply match an offer and thus maintain its broadcast rights with the league.
The public communication on this, frankly, stinks. It turns out that neither the NBA nor WBD wants the common folk to join them in the weeds of the legal wrangling.
What is known from the available reporting, including The Athletic’s Andrew Marchand and Mike Vorkunov, is that WBD, whose signature TNT program “Inside the NBA” is the single most dynamic element of any of the NBA’s various broadcast packages, wants to match one of the existing offers, most likely the one written by Amazon.
The NBA apparently feels that it can prevent Warner Bros. Discovery from exercising this back-end matching clause, which kind of makes one wonder why it was written in the first place. The league isn’t going to include such clauses in future contracts, and…You know what? This is honestly too tedious to cover.
So let’s leave it at this: The people at WBD want in. They want another long-term deal. Their engine for success with it, aside from the quality of play itself, is “Inside the NBA,” which opens and closes every great hoops broadcast that TNT ever produces.
And for us, the viewers, WBD’s avid interest in continuing can mean only one thing: Nobody at the company is taking Charles Barkley at his word.
I can get on board with this. Barkley, after all, has a well-documented history of either taking back things he utters on the air, or later acknowledging that he didn’t much mean them in the first place.
As applied to this situation, that’s great news. It suggests that executives at TNT, and by extension Warner Bros. Discovery, have already come to the conclusion that Chuck won’t feel fully bound by his own proclamation that the coming NBA season will be his last on TV.
To be fair to Barkley, he didn’t stutter. “I ain’t going nowhere other than TNT,” the 61-year-old Hall of Famer said during the NBA Finals, “but I have made the decision that, no matter what happens, next year is going to be my last year on television. And I just want to say thank you to my NBA family. You guys have been great to me. My heart is full with joy and gratitude.”
That is a fairly compelling — and complete — thought. Then again, it was spoken at a time when the NBA rights conversation was at high pitch, and TNT was losing. It was becoming increasingly apparent that the league was happily preparing for life after Warner Bros. Discovery, with huge offers looming from Disney, Amazon and NBC.
Barkley wasn’t happy. He was all over the map, though. Just a few weeks earlier, Charles said on “The Dan Patrick Show” that morale “sucks” at TNT – then noted that he was considering keeping “Inside the NBA” going by taking the whole show within his own production company.
“My two favorite wines are Inglenook and Opus,” Barkley added. “These clowns I work for, they’ve turned us into Ripple and Boone’s Farm and Thunderbird.”
That’s a good line. That is a Chuckster line. What you wanted, in that moment, was for Shaq, Ernie and Kenny to be on hand to respond to it. Which is another way of saying that “Inside the NBA” is the show nobody wants to lose.
So Barkley in June said he was finished, but only weeks earlier he said he might just take the show in-house himself. Those are two nearly opposite reactions.
Again, not that unusual — the situation has been fluid, Charles likes to talk, fans like to listen, and it doesn’t always matter whether he believes 100% of what he spits out.
But it brings us back to the rights deal. At the very least, it seems that the NBA feels it has a legal way around Warner Bros. Discovery exercising its right to match an offer. The possibility of this scenario has been brewing for months, and Adam Silver doesn’t keep a fleet of lawyers on hand to do nothing. They’ve been game-planning.
What’s more interesting is that WBD wants to pursue this — and its top dog, David Zaslav, has repeatedly mentioned the company’s right to match an NBA broadcast offer. (Most observers think WBD is going after the Amazon deal.)
Either the corporation is trying to extract a money settlement to go away, or it really wants to continue with the NBA on TNT. That very successful production relies heavily on “Inside the NBA;” the studio show in turn relies heavily on all four of its regulars remaining in place.
Barkley has positioned himself as the wild card in that equation. Then again, he has made a wonderful TV career out of changing his mind. If Warner Bros. Discovery really is all in on matching that rights package, you have to know it believes that, when it’s all settled, Charles will be in his usual seat. There is no downside to that thought.
Mark Kreidler is a national award-winning writer whose work has appeared at ESPN, the New York Times, Washington Post, Time, Newsweek and dozens of other publications. He’s also a sports-talk veteran with stops in San Francisco and Sacramento, and the author of three books, including the bestselling “Four Days to Glory.” More of his writing can be found at https://markkreidler.substack.com. He is also reachable on Twitter @MarkKreidler.
