Inside the NBA star Charles Barkley lashed out at Warner Bros. Discovery management Thursday, with the conglomerate now appearing as though it might let the opportunity to renew NBA TV rights, along with Barkley's popular studio show, Inside the NBA, slip away.
"Morale sucks, plain and simple," the emotional NBA Hall-of-Fame player said during a morning appearance on Dan Patrick's podcast.
Barkley has been a fixture on TNT's influential studio show for 24 years -- long enough to recall meeting some of the Inside the NBA crew's now college-aged children when they were infants.
The uncertainty among the crew, which Barkley described as "family," as to whether Warner and its TNT channel will lose NBA rights after the 2024-25 season "just sucks right now," he told Patrick.
"My two favorite wines are Inglenook and Opus. We've got the best studio show in the business, and these clowns I work for have turned us into Ripple, Boone's Farm and Thunderbird," said Barkley, referencing the three Sports Emmys Inside the NBA won earlier this week.
Barkley said he's also frustrated that TNT just announced a sub-licensing deal with ESPN for the College Football Playoff.
"I’m like, ‘Well damn, they could have used that money to buy the NBA.' We’ve never had college football before. Shouldn’t we spend every dime we have to keep the NBA," he added.
Barkley also said that he's discussed with co-stars Kenny Smith, Shaquille O'Neal and Ernie Johnson the possibility of having his own production company, Fine Line Productions, produce a new version of Inside the NBA with the same cast and crew, and license it to either Amazon or NBCU.
Barkely didn't mention WBD CEO David Zaslav by name, but he did reference "the guy who said, 'We don't need the NBA.'"
Chances that Warner Bros. Discovery will reach a TV rights renewal with the NBA appear bleak.
The league is reportedly in the final stages of forging $7.4 billion dollars' worth of per-season contracts with Disney/ESPN, Amazon and Comcast/NBC Universal. And Warner on Wednesday announced a five-year deal with ESPN to sublicense College Football Playoff games for TNT.
Several sports media pundits took that as a sign that WBD had already decided to let the NBA go.
LightShed 🎯#7 in our Top 24 for 24"to offset the loss of the NBA and prevent a drop in affiliate fees tied to sports content, we expect WBD to license some additional sports content with a lower total dollar figure than the NBA. We predict a secondary tier of the… https://t.co/cH5QHQoqBNMay 22, 2024
