‘Inside the NBA’ will live on, but the potential for meddling is a good excuse to celebrate it again
The collective chemistry of “Inside the NBA,” in which ego is consistently punctured for the sake of comedy, is extremely hard to find in sports television.
“Inside the NBA” and TNT’s NBA coverage as a whole has won 23 Sports Emmys in its 36 seasons.
Considering that the program is, in the estimation of this media columnist and an enormous number of other fans, the best studio show across all sports and eras ever to exist, that number feels low.
Maybe it should have been nominated in the regular Emmys, in one of the comedy categories. It has been that funny through the years, and would have had a legitimate chance to pad its stats.
This crossed my mind recently for a few reasons. The show added the latest two Sports Emmys to its collection back on May 20, with Ernie Johnson named outstanding host and Charles Barkley outstanding personality.
(“Inside the NBA” was nominated for outstanding weekly studio show, but lost to ESPN’s “College GameDay.” No shame in that.)
This year’s awards occurred a few days before one of the funniest moments I’ve ever witnessed while watching “Inside the NBA.”
Analyst Kenny Smith was telling a long story about how his mother wouldn’t allow him to have a car while he was a student at the University of North Carolina unless he got all Bs or better for grades.
Barkley and fellow analyst Shaquille O’Neal needled him, as they do, and Barkley fired off a line that made everyone in my living room laugh out loud as the show headed for a commercial break.
“And to this day,” said Barkley, “Kenny has never driven a car.”
Yes, as a matter of fact, I am sitting here guffawing like an idiot as I type those words.
That one-liner was quintessential Barkley, who has the Must-Watch factor in a way only John Madden and a very short list of other sports broadcasters have achieved. The joke was so perfectly befitting a show in which the talent interacts not as colleagues, but in the no-one-is-safe-from-being-a-punchline way that real, genuine, unfiltered friends do.
The collective chemistry of “Inside the NBA,” in which ego is consistently punctured for the sake of comedy, is extremely hard to find in sports television, as evidenced by pretty much every awkward and uninspiring version of an NBA studio show that ESPN has ever produced.
That, of course, is the other reason the show has been on my mind, and the minds of most other NBA fans.
TNT’s superb run as NBA broadcast rights partner will end with the conclusion of the Pacers-Knicks Eastern Conference finals.
“Inside the NBA” will continue, but under different circumstances that should bring at least some skepticism about whether a show that needs not a single change will remain quite the same.
After months of drama and uncertainty about its future, parent company Warner Brothers Discovery agreed to license it to ESPN when the new 11-year, $76 billion rights deal kicks in next season.
The full cast — Johnson, Barkley, Smith, and O’Neal, who have been together since 2011 — will remain intact. TNT will continue to produce the show.
Make no mistake: Compared with where this originally appeared headed, the “Inside”-to-ESPN outcome is awfully close to a best-case scenario. I just wish I could be convinced, as some of my other sports-media columnist brethren apparently are, that ESPN won’t screw this up.
ESPN has spent years, even decades, trying and failing to come up with NBA studio programming that can be mentioned in the same book as “Inside The NBA,” let alone on the same page or sentence. It has failed and failed again, and its worst version yet is probably its current one, with Stephen A. Smith chronically caterwauling about the Knicks and Kendrick Perkins inevitably contradicting something he said a few minutes earlier.
Maybe its weird to be nostalgic for something that isn’t truly ending, but the I’m-gonna-miss-this sentiments come in part out of fear for what ESPN might do to what TNT built.
Since TNT will produce the show, perhaps that will prevent some ESPN interference. But you’re telling me Mike Greenberg, or Perkins, or Screamin’ A., won’t be shoehorned on the set from time to time, or perhaps more than time to time? ESPN’s if-you-can’t-beat-‘em, license-‘em approach is wise, and it saved a wonderful show, but I’ve seen too many TV executives screw up too many good things to believe ESPN bosses will be able to resist some wholly unnecessary tinkering.
The thoughtful Smith — c’mon, he definitely has driven a car, Chuck — expressed some skepticism regarding whether the show will remain the same in a recent interview with The New Yorker.
“We have the same crew of people doing the show,” he said. “But the timing: are we a half hour now? Are we forty-five minutes? Fifteen minutes? Those are the things that you can control when you own your [intellectual property]. But we don’t.”
We won’t know how this is going to go until we see it a few times. So allow me, then, to be nostalgic for something that will still exist.
I’ve thought often of the late Craig Sager and how bemused he was when Kevin Garnett verbally shredded his wardrobe. How fun it has been all these years to hear Kevin Harlan (who is headed for Amazon) call a big play. How gracefully the “Inside The NBA” guys handled heartbreaking moments, such as Kobe Bryant’s death in 2016.
Watching TNT’s NBA coverage wind down the last few weeks has felt a little like watching Sam Malone close Cheers for the last time. Had he and the gang matriculated to a new bar, we still would have known their names. It would not have felt the same.
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