Charles Barkley has said he’ll be at TNT for life. Not if Burke Magnus has anything to say about it.
Magnus, ESPN’s newly minted president of content, told Front Office Sports on Tuesday that in a “perfect world,” he would hire Barkley to anchor the network’s NBA studio coverage.
It was a tacit admission that ESPN has struggled for years to match the success of Barkley’s Inside the NBA.
At the Tuned In summit in midtown Manhattan, FOS reporter Michael McCarthy asked Magnus whether he could see Barkley joining ESPN.
“Yeah,” Magnus responded. “Yeah. That would be a perfect world, actually. Charles is a singular talent.”
He called the 2024–2025 NBA season a “bridge to the future,” referring to the fact that the NBA’s old media deals expire after this season. Starting in 2025, Disney will be paying the NBA $2.6 billion a year over an 11-year deal for NBA and WNBA broadcast rights.
“I would be lying if we said we weren’t interested in Charles,” Magnus said. “I think the entire industry is interested in Charles. He’s really that special. We’ll see.”
That much is certainly true. Barkley said earlier this year he had talked to every network with NBA rights, and that his loyalty to TNT would cost him $100 million “minimum.” Though Barkley has proclaimed he’s staying with the network forever, he’s been known to change his future plans on a dime—including this summer, when he threatened to retire. Now ESPN has taken its pursuit of him out in the open.
Magnus even added a little recruiting pitch.
“I just keep reassuring people that if you come work for us, that doesn’t mean you have to—this narrative gets started that if you come work for us, you also have to do 200 episodes of First Take or Get Up. The car wash—no. The car wash is for people who want their car washed.” Magnus added that he had reassured Jason Kelce, the recently retired NFL star who joined the network’s NFL coverage this fall, that he could do as little or as much as he liked.
Stephen A. Smith accidentally threw water on Magnus’s pitch later at the conference on Tuesday. McCarthy asked Smith if he would ever work with Barkley.
“Probably not, because Charles Barkley doesn’t want to work that much,” Smith responded. “I’ve seen him walk by executives and say ‘I’ll never work for y’all asses, because you work people too hard,’” Smith said, reinforcing the perception that Magnus was trying to counter. He added that working with Barkley would be a “dream come true” and “something I would welcome” but lamented the possibility of Ernie Johnson leaving NBA coverage. He did say that Barkley’s chemistry with Johnson, Shaquille O’Neal, and Kenny Smith had created a “dream team” at TNT.
NBCUniversal chairman Mark Lazarus followed Magnus on stage at Tuned In and matched the frank admission. NBC’s NBA rights kick in starting with the 2025–2026 season.
“If Charles were available, we’d certainly love to have that conversation with him,” Lazarus told McCarthy. “We’ve known him for a long time. We’ve known him from the time that we were there in 2000 or so. So we think that Charles adds a great element to everything he does. He’s been a guest on our shows. If he were to be available, certainly we’d be talking to him. Unless Burke Magnus talks to him first.”
Barkley, largely seen as the master of negotiating through the media, now has executives playing his own game.
