After 36 years as a U.S. rightsholder for live National Basketball Association game broadcasts in the United States, TNT Sports officially signed off on Saturday night concurrent with the conclusion of the NBA Eastern Conference Finals. While the broadcasts will not be continuing domestically next season, the award-winning Inside the NBA studio show will continue under a sublicensing deal with The Walt Disney Company. Ernie Johnson, Charles Barkley, Kenny “The Jet” Smith and Shaquille O’Neal are expected to be back on the air continuing to host the show despite the league commencing 11-year media rights deals with The Walt Disney Company (ESPN/ABC), Comcast Corporation (NBC/Peacock) and Amazon (Prime Video) reportedly worth a collective $77 billion.
Even though TNT Sports is going to continue creating and producing Inside the NBA, Simmons fears that its new platforms of dissemination is going to cause the program to be damaged. During a recent edition of The Bill Simmons Podcast through Spotify and The Ringer, Simmons expressed his thoughts about the program, accentuating the pattern by which ESPN has enacted its NBA in-game programming previously.
“ESPN’s going to f**k the show up – I don’t care if I get aggregated – I think they’re going to f**k the show up,” Simmons explained. “Unless they completely change how they do commercials, the show is going to be different and people are going to be pissed, and Barkley and those guys are going to be pissed, and I think it’s going to go badly. The only way it doesn’t go badly is if they do the commercials and they give them the lengthy segments that you need to have that show work.”
Simmons pointed to how current halftime shows featuring the NBA Countdown cast are markedly short, delineating that they are on the air for a minute-and-a-half. With The Walt Disney Company paying a reported $2.62 billion per year for NBA rights, which includes the company continuing to air the NBA Finals on ABC and other marquee matchups throughout the regular season and playoffs, Simmons believes that if it does not change how it approaches the studio program, everyone will be mad. Ryen Russillo appeared on the podcast and expanded on Simmons’ point, articulating that he barely watches the halftime program on ESPN.
“That’s the 15-minute timer to get something done around the house for me, and if I do catch some of it, I mean it’s just a lock,” Russillo said. “It’s like, ‘Oh, the best player on the team went 2-for-10.’ Okay, he’s going to get scolded. Like, ‘Okay, it’s a 30-second scolding,’ and then I don’t know who okayed – maybe it was because everybody was trying to be the TNT show – but the analysts talking to break. Nobody’s good at it, folks – nobody’s good at it. It’s just confusing.”
Russillo opined that he believes the people at the top of ESPN know this, but Simmons conveyed that they have not cared and instead cash the checks from the commercials. Having done this throughout the entire century, according to Simmons, the only way the network will be able to accommodate the program is by shifting its business model. Later in the conversation, he spoke about the quick transition from the live game broadcast to SportsCenter with Scott Van Pelt, something that he thinks is deliberate.
“Look, the real secret sauce to ESPN is they’re trying to drive as much revenue to SportsCenter as possible, so the faster that they can have that SportsCenter follow the end of the game, that boosts the rating for that SportsCenter, and then they can get, that’s 365 days a year, they can just get more money for it,” Simmons said. “That’s not going to work with Inside the NBA, so I don’t know. I guess that SportsCenter just goes away and they move Inside the NBA in there was the only way that would work because that’s what the fans are going to want.
“If they mess with any piece of this, everyone’s going to be mad, and that’s the part that I can’t wait to watch. Like, even like little insignificant stuff, if we feel like it’s different in any way, people will be mad, and that’s it. I don’t know how it plays out.”
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