A Eulogy for Inside the NBA (but hopefully not!)
The best sideshow in sports deserves a future
We here at Degenerate Rambling need to issue a correction. Urgently.
Earlier this month, in my Patriots draft analysis, I stated that the Food Network competition series Chopped is the peak of all television. This was in complete disregard of the existence of Inside the NBA on TNT. Please humbly accept our apology; it is important for us truth-tellers at this scrappy publication not to engage in egregious misinformation. Democracy dies in darkness.
Just ask the GUANGDONG TIGAHSSSSS- - -
We’re gathered here today, not to mourn the loss of Inside the NBA — whose parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery, may lose its NBA broadcasting rights to NBC, and according to… Bill Simmons?, already has — but to celebrate its life.
Actually, we are gonna mourn, albeit prematurely, because the possible death of the unanimously acclaimed, nominally-sports-based program deserves a tearful sendoff.
Inside has been on the air longer than I’ve been alive, and its current, iconic roster — led by Ernie Johnson alongside Charles Barkley, Kenny Smith and Shaquille O’Neal — has been steady since I can remember caring about sports, and in fact, even before I cared about sports.
The Inside guys. / credit: TNT
I could be wrong here, but I think most people who get into sports writing do it for some delta between two main reasons: they wanted to be a pro athlete and it didn’t work out, or they were otherwise obsessed with sports as a spectator from an early age.
I share neither of those qualities. My media diet until embarrassingly late in my upbringing was resigned to another Turner staple, Cartoon Network, and Internet comedy, well before anything on it was actually targeted to children my age (shout out to Newgrounds and Homestar Runner). My social anxiety as a young child was also prohibitively high, forcing me to scatter when kids came together to organize a game of kickball or soccer on the playground.
Obviously, the switch flipped at some point. Now, I write a whole-ass newsletter about sports and am entrenched in the ‘guy who loves to sit around and name old sports guys’ guy camp. In no small part of that switch flipping were the fellas at Studio J, shooting the shit.
Inside is about basketball like La Croix is about the fruits after which they are ‘flavored.’ A sip of the fizz will invoke a passing thought of lemon or, uh, pamplemousse? But don’t expect much further than that. Similarly, I tune in to the game breaks and pre-shows on TNT and get a passing whiff of hoops that brushes past my limbic system. All fine and good, but that’s not really what I’m here for. I turned on Inside to watch a quartet of Uncles prank each other and dare one another to stray further and further out of pocket, NBA be damned.
“Yeah… that’s not on here, man.”
Inside the NBA was a gateway drug for me to the actual product of pro basketball not unlike the parasocial worship of Taylor Swift has been for the recent ingénues to the NFL, mostly young women. And like the Swiftie 9-to-5 of combing through the pop idol’s private jet life beyond her music, Inside stands on its own from the main product that’s actually intended to be entertainment In fact, I find it far more enjoyable when Ernie, Chuck, Shaq and Jet talk about anything other than the sport three of them played professionally. I’d sooner watch them joke about Kenny’s messed-up knees or Chuck’s apparent vendetta against the whole of South Texas than any given first-round playoff matchup.
credit: TMZ
The NBA as a sports empire needs the Inside desk. The regular season has seen a consistent struggle in recent years to grab eyeballs, the All-Star Game is a universally-panned mess and the contenders for the Finals are practically predetermined any given season, due to a complete lack of parity and effort on the part of the worst teams. The draft lottery seems to not reward drowning franchises yet fails to prevent tanking all at once. The bottomfeeders of the league play a cacophonous game of musical chairs with head coaching retreads and abysmal roster building. Even if the 82-game marathon required to get to the empirically better playoff games was interesting, you wouldn’t know it from watching the morning shows, ever dedicated to the equal-time rule — half the time for the Lakers, half for the other 29 teams.
I can appreciate NBA Commissioner Adam Silver’s proactive attempts to zhuzh up the early leg of his league’s calendar, but I fear his desired returns are destined to diminish. The In-Season Tournament is both novel among American sports while comparable to other global sporting competitions, of which Silver clearly envisions the NBA as a rising peer. Unfortunately for Silver, as long as the lifeblood of the Association runs red, white and blue, The NBA Cup as a mid-year trophy worth caring about, emphasis on mid-, will be a hard sell, even if it seems to have helped regular-season ratings some.
In fact, on opening night of this season, Silver tried that pitch on Inside the NBA, and entered the shark tank outside the Denver Nuggets’ ring night in Ball Arena. The Inside guys acted as sensible conduits of the audience, pressing him on the point of the tournament, solutions to abuse of load management, and even an unscripted** question from Chuck about dealing with players recently accused of domestic violence.
**(As the title of Ernie’s 2017 memoir suggests, the entirety of Inside is unscripted, hence the chaotic format, seemingly tethered to structure only by the confines of basketball game tip-off times. A more accurate assessment here would be that Charles asked a question that was not run by Silver or the league prior to the interview, a rare sight).
No other major sports entity is required to kiss the ring on national television in this manner. Roger Goodell does TV spots, but his NFL is undeniably teflon amidst a perennial smorgasbord of controversy. Rob Manfred and Gary Bettman are almost universally reviled by fans of baseball and hockey, respectively, and they feel no pressure to answer to their cottage media ecosystems. FIFA is basically a criminal organization that’s really good at lawn care, you think Gianni Infantino needs to explain himself to a pundit?
Even ESPN, the other current rights-holder of the NBA, does not share this aura. Their myopic facsimiles of Inside lack inspiration, their show looking more like Stephen A. Smith holding three to four normal people hostage on a TV set in twenty-minute increments. Should NBC roll out their desk show when the rights transfer, their bullpen is empty, as well. The only rubber stamp that Silver needs lies at the desk of the four wise Uncles.
A depressing lack of aura. / credit: ESPN
It may seem weird that, when discussing a sports television megadeal valued in the billions of dollars, the biggest concern on anyone’s mind aren’t the games themselves, but the pre-show where a retired player insists to other retired players — none of whom will pay much attention to the evening’s game, by the way — that the moon is closer than the west coast, because he can see the moon but can’t see California. But the fact of the matter is that any given moment of Inside the NBA is more entertaining to the average basketball fan than a regular-season NBA match. So why is Warner Bros. Discovery, the newly-Frankensteined conglomerate that governs all Turner properties, letting both slip from their fingers without a fight?
do you think they asked him to pose like that or do you think he just did that / credit: Mark Seliger/Vanity Fair
David Zaslav was put in charge of WBD when WarnerMedia, formerly connected to AT&T, merged with Discovery in 2022, having been the president of the latter since 2006. When I was growing up, Discovery was associated with edutainment-style shows and mini-documentaries that were consumable for family audiences. Now, it's the domain of Chip and Joanna Gaines and that man from 90 Day Fiancé who always looks damp — thanks, David.
It was shortly after the WBD merger that Zaslav became persona non grata on the ground in Hollywood for being a chief negotiator against the WGA strikers and other laborers shutting down work in solidarity. You may recall his commencement speech getting drowned out at his alma mater, Boston University, with chants of ‘pay your writers!,’ in reference to the fact that the private jet enthusiast would have actually saved money for WBD by meeting all of the WGA’s demands (costing less than one percent of annual revenue to do so), rather than letting the strike continue.
The strike has been over since September of last year, but the effects in full are still incalculable. Last summer, I predicted that streaming services like Netflix would double down on sports content once the inevitable drought in scripted content came down the pike, and that they would also finally get off their ass and figure out how to live-stream events if they want in on upcoming rights deals with sports leagues. Just a few days after The Roast of Tom Brady went off without a hitch (not counting Sadfleck), Netflix announced that they’ll be the global home of the NFL’s Christmas Day slate.
WBD is in prime position to retain the NBA, or at least they should be. They have the traditional cable television presence on TNT, but like Netflix, they have a successful streaming service in Max to complement it. They’ve implemented more free (for now) features in the app to watch their live sports offerings, which also includes the NHL. As Zaslav should know all too well, sports content is significantly cheaper, and WBD’s competitors are wasting no time jumping on it. But his words say otherwise; two years ago, the CEO said that they didn’t need the NBA; he also mostly kept mum about basketball at WBD’s upfronts this week. So, if you’re keeping score at home, you don’t need writers for scripted shows, but you also don’t need sports to supplement the lack of scripted shows. Follow these simple steps and you, too, can get paid 50 million dollars a year for your brilliance!
credit: WBD
Lest we fully lower Inside the NBA into the grave, it's entirely possible that the show lives somewhere else in the future. NBC, ESPN or even Amazon Prime, the unacknowledged third party of the future of NBA broadcasting, could poach any or all of the Uncles. Color me dramatic, but I think such a ‘blockbuster trade’ would prove imperative to the NBA media as we know it.
The whole of basketball media is reactionary to everything — the pre-game outfits, the post-game interviews with spicy quotables, player social media posts, the coaching carousel, dating rumors, body language, blockbuster trades, free agency, anonymous reports — everything except the damn games!
And, trust me, I am not saying Charles Barkley and Shaq give insightful analysis into how the Warriors approach the pick and roll. But what they do offer is the only palatable, and certainly the funniest, version of basketball conservatism.
I *literally* screen recorded this myself because Substack and Twitter are on their Drake-Kendrick bullshit and I can’t embed, but it was worth it / credit: @GrantGoldberg
When the basketball media chorus demands that the Lakers or the Suns fire their coaches, Barkley responds blaming the players for not getting the job done in the postseason. When there’s a full court press to defend the load management phenomenon, Uncles do what Uncles do best: clown on the youngbloods for not walking uphill and through the snow to get to their games. It doesn’t mean they’re right, even if they did seem to pierce through the consensus a bit and get people asking questions. But its nothing if not refreshing.
When Stephen A. Smith talks about Zion Williamson eating the table at dinner, I cringe at the lengths the former journalist caricature-izes himself to ‘make ESPN money,’ as he has so self-awarely put it. When Chuck says the Pelicans star looks like he and Shaq had a baby, it goes down a lot smoother, if still offensive. Even with Swagged-Out White Boy Emeritus Ernie Johnson absent, the tried-and-true lob from Shaq egging Barkley again to repeat himself always ends in a slam dunk on the opposite end of the desk.
If everyone wants to say some words at your funeral, you were probably well-remembered. Inside the NBA is the subject of many a eulogy right now, and everyone who works on the show, from the fellas to Underdog to the crew to the reporters and everyone in-between, is deserving to hear these kind, parting words while they’re all still with us.
Time will only tell if these well wishes are truly for an ending, or instead a new beginning elsewhere (maybe somewhere with the rights to Roundball Rock). For the sake of the NBA, let’s all pray for the latter.