Earlier in the week, there were several reports pertaining to the future of Stephen A. Smith working at ESPN ahead of the expiration of his contract in July 2025. The two sides are in negotiations on a six-year deal worth $20 million annually, marking the largest yearly amount ever paid to an ESPN on-air personality outside of a licensing deal. Reports have also indicated that Smith’s contract would be paid from a variety of entities aside from ESPN, including Disney Entertainment and ESPN BET. Smith currently serves as the executive producer and featured commentator on First Take and as an analyst for the NBA Countdown studio program.
Warner Bros. Discovery recently agreed to a deal through which it will sublicense Inside the NBA to The Walt Disney Company, which plans to utilize the show surrounding marquee basketball events. The award-winning combination of Ernie Johnson, Charles Barkley, Shaquille O’Neal and Kenny “The Jet” Smith has proven to resonate with viewers over the years, and the show will continue despite TNT Sports no longer presenting live NBA game broadcasts in the United States. Disney is set to begin a new 11-year media rights deal with the league for a reported $2.62 billion per year commencing next season.
While NBA Countdown is expected to continue for events in which Inside the NBA is not on the air, former ESPN president John Skipper does not foresee Smith being restricted to the one show. Skipper, who is the co-founder and chief executive officer of Meadowlark Media, recently appeared on The Sporting Class alongside David Samson and Pablo Torre where they discussed the settlement between Warner Bros. Discovery and the National Basketball Association, along with its subsequent effects. Samson, the former president of the Miami Marlins, stated that NBA Countdown was becoming “a B-level team studio show” for pregame and postgame coverage.
“They certainly will not want to call it that, and they probably have to account for my friend Stephen A. Smith, who really cares about the NBA and is not going to want to just be in the shadow of these other guys,” Skipper said. “I think you’ll see him on Inside the NBA at some point.”
Samson elucidated that the only way for ESPN to pay Smith $20 million per year is by spreading it across different areas of The Walt Disney Company. Within his discourse, he explained that different departments under chief executive officer Bob Iger could be negotiating what they are going to extract from their budgets. These conversations would presumably allocate how the contract would be paid and, he feels, part of the reason why Smith could become involved in other areas of the media conglomerate.
“It’s true, of course, and ordinarily they feel like they’re ridiculous because there’s no way anybody could do all that,” Samson said of these discussions. “With Stephen A., he is maybe the hardest-working on-air talent – among the hardest-working on-air talents – I ever saw. He would do a radio show in the morning, a talk show in the afternoon…. Stephen works, works and works.”
Reflecting on the hypothetical scenario, Samson conveyed that he finds it funny when companies fight internally. He illustrated Iger having different fiefdoms within his empire that are either competing to take his place or stand out. Yet he emphasized that in the end, the $20 million salary would still be paid by a combination of subsidiaries that are under The Walt Disney Company rather than wholly separate entities themselves. Skipper, however, does not believe that this structure will end up coming to fruition.
“I will actually hazard to guess that all of the salary’s being paid by ESPN and that Stephen A. has the ambition to be doing other things that he wants to do, and that they are reaching out to the other parts of the company to say, ‘Gee, could you take a meeting with Stephen A.? He’s interested in producing a scripted film,’ so my guess would be that they’re not,” Skipper explained. “I don’t ever remember being involved in many instances where we were going looking for money from other divisions.”
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