ESPN reportedly planning ‘extensive’ postgame edition of ‘Inside the NBA’

There is one big question facing Inside the NBA, the legendary TNT studio show starring Charles Barkley and Co., as it gets set to jump to ESPN next season as part of a licensing agreement: Will it be on postgame?

We appear to be a little closer to answering that question based on new reporting from Michael McCarthy in his latest at Front Office Sports: “There will be an extensive postgame show, say sources. ESPN’s goal is to let the postgame segment run as long as it does now on TNT.”

What a relief. After all, the only edition of the beloved TNT show that is actually called Inside the NBA is the postgame version. That’s when basketball fades away, and suddenly we’re all watching a late-night variety show that just so happens to be hosted by a sports reporter and three former NBA stars.

This would be a departure for ESPN. Across all sports, ESPN uses its studio shows as pregame lead-ins. Whether it’s College GameDay, Monday Night Countdown, or Baseball Tonight, the most famous studio properties at ESPN all air before games, afterward, it’s on to SportsCenter. That strategy has survived into the 2020s thanks to the enormous success and popularity of the midnight SC hosted by Scott Van Pelt.

It’s one thing for ESPN management to create an opening for Inside to be Inside. It’s another to adjust its infrastructure entirely.

As McCarthy (and others) have noted, most of ESPN’s biggest NBA games air on ABC. When those games end, the local affiliates take over with their nightly news broadcasts. Redirecting millions of basketball viewers back to ESPN, especially now that fans will be able to get ESPN on streaming, is easier said than done.

At the same time, the network will need Van Pelt to play ball. He worked hard to build the late-night SC into a money-maker, adding his personal touch to it. Van Pelt, to his credit, has expressed an openness to working alongside the TNT crew when Inside came to ESPN.

Lastly, a reminder from Bill Simmons. While predicting that ESPN would “f*ck up” Inside, he issued a sober warning. Simmons emphasized how much ESPN cares about SportsCenter and driving revenue to its signature (albeit waning) property. It remains to be seen how ESPN will sell ads and monetize a version of Inside that jumps around channels over the course of the night and technically belongs to another production company.

And that’s before you get to the existing talent. Malika Andrews, Kendrick Perkins, and Bob Myers, in particular, have been prominent pieces of the network’s NBA Countdown coverage for years.

Everyone agrees there is no sense in licensing Inside and then butchering it, same as The Pat McAfee Show or the ManningCast. It sounds like ESPN executives agree. The problem is just how big a cannonball it will be in the usually still waters in Bristol to make that happen.