Charles Barkley Wants Balanced Schedule for ‘Inside the NBA’ on ESPN

Charles Barkley actually wants ESPN to work him more.

In the leadup to TNT’s licensing of Inside the NBA to ESPN, Barkley repeatedly—and publicly—made it clear he did not want to work on ESPN’s other studio programming, like Get Up and First Take. Nevertheless, on an appearance with The Dan Le Batard Show Barkley talked about how he wished the iconic NBA show was getting into more of a rhythm earlier in the season. 

“We’ve complained, we’ve only been on ESPN four times in three months,” Barkley said. “I don’t like that at all. What I was talking about working all the time, because I love watching basketball – I’m not going to do all these damn shows. I’m not gonna be on ESPN One, Two, Three, Deportes, Nacho, Echo, whatever they call it. I’m not gonna be doing all that, but I wish we had been on more during the first half of the season.”

Technically, they have been on five times so far. Last year, he was generally on TNT on a weekly basis and thus would have had more than a dozen shows by this point in the season. 

“They’re gonna start making up some of the days,” Barkley continued. “But we only worked one day in December, that was Christmas Day. And we’re only working one day in January, basically … I wish we had worked more.”

As Barkley noted, the appearances are heavily backloaded. The schedule indicates Inside the NBA will be on ESPN or ABC 15 times between now and the end of the regular season in mid-April. Then it will air every time ESPN or ABC has playoff games. 

In recent comments to Sports Illustrated, ESPN president of content Burke Magnus called the backloaded schedule an “imperfect situation from our perspective,” and said that the network preferred to have Inside the NBA “be more regular throughout the season.”

There are a couple things ESPN could do here. One option could be to move some dates on the Sunday Showcase on ABC—where there are pregame and halftime shows, but no postgame—to be on ESPN earlier in the season, and use NBA Countdown for the Sunday games. Another possibility would be for ESPN to work out a deal with TNT for more Inside the NBA dates, whether that be through the barter system or directly paying for them. 

ESPN has the slate of Inside the NBA that it does by virtue of a trade in which ESPN is licensing a collection of Big 12 football and basketball games to TNT.