Charles Barkley made an appearance on The Bill Simmons Podcast this week, where he covered a wide range of topics, including Olympic basketball, the Boston Celtics, the WNBA, Caitlin Clark, and his uncertain future with TNT. Despite his previously announced intention to retire after the 2024-2025 season—coinciding with the end of Turner’s NBA broadcasting rights—Barkley has since reconsidered, opting to stay on with TNT for the remainder of his 10-year contract. This decision came after TNT revealed plans to keep Inside the NBA going, even after they lose NBA rights.
However, even Barkley himself seems baffled about how that will work. As the podcast conversation with Bill Simmons neared its end, Barkley admitted he’s still leaning toward retirement, but expressed confusion over TNT’s plans for the future of Inside the NBA. According to Barkley, neither he nor the network seems to have a clear idea of what the show will look like post-NBA.
“They don’t even know what we’re going to do,” Barkley told Simmons, recounting a recent meeting with Turner executives. “I’m sitting in this meeting in Philly, and they’re telling me, ‘We wanna keep doing the show.’ I was like, what do you mean? They said, ‘We want to keep y’all together.’ And I said, ‘Well, I’d consider that because I want my friends to keep their jobs.’ So I asked, ‘What are we gonna do?’ And they still haven’t figured it out. I’m like, what? I said, ‘We won’t have basketball, so what the hell are we gonna do?'”
Barkley found the situation “fascinating” and clearly perplexing. With Turner losing NBA rights after the 2024-2025 season, the future of the long-running, beloved show is in limbo. “They want to do the show at least another year, but I’m like, we don’t even have basketball. Are we going to pay for highlights?” he quipped, adding to the general sense of uncertainty surrounding the network’s plans.
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In classic Barkley fashion, he didn’t hold back when criticizing the network for its handling of negotiations. “They f—– up the negotiations,” he said bluntly, echoing a similar sentiment he shared with Dan Patrick in a more work-safe manner not too long ago.
Bill Simmons then posed an interesting question: Why wouldn’t another NBA broadcast partner simply poach the entire Inside the NBA crew? Barkley didn’t think it was likely, explaining that Ernie Johnson, the show’s anchor, would probably not want to leave Atlanta, where he’s long been based. Simmons countered by suggesting that they could continue doing the show in Atlanta, keeping the existing infrastructure intact, even if it meant moving to another network.
“Hey, everything is on the board,” Barkley responded. “As I told you earlier, we have zero f—— idea what’s going to happen after this year. Zero.”
Whether Ernie Johnson would be willing to leave Turner and TNT for another network remains an open question. But between the apparent lack of clarity from the network and Barkley’s candid admissions of uncertainty, it’s clear that the future of Inside the NBA is up in the air.
Fans of the show—and its hosts—will likely have to wait until the end of the next basketball season to see what happens to one of the most beloved sports programs on television.
With Barkley, Johnson, Shaquille O’Neal, and Kenny Smith at the helm, Inside the NBA has become an iconic part of NBA coverage, but its fate after TNT’s NBA deal ends is now anyone’s guess.
