The 'Inside the NBA' crew talks about LeBron James ahead of a Los Angeles Lakers-Cleveland Cavaliers game. Photo Credit: ESPN Photo Credit: ESPN
By Matt Yoder on

Inside the NBA is the most beloved studio show in sports history. But after its first full season at ESPN, it’s fair to wonder whether the show carries the same weight it once did, given its new, lighter schedule.

And basketball fans rejoiced when ESPN stepped in to license the show after Warner Bros. Discovery lost its NBA package beginning in the 2025-2026 season.

Sure, Inside the NBA isn’t perfect. It’s often too negative and disconnected from today’s game. The analysts can be too curmudgeonly and only want to relive their own glory days. And new broadcasters like NBC and Amazon featured more contemporary voices who actually fed fans real basketball talk about today’s game, not just how the stars of yesteryear would dominate today.

But the insights, chemistry, and humor of Charles Barkley, Kenny Smith, Ernie Johnson, and Shaquille O’Neal are unmatched. They are appointment viewing because they are entertaining for basketball fans and non-basketball fans alike. And even if you weren’t a regular viewer, you probably saw clips and quotes from the show going viral every week, whether it was basketball talk, politics, or comedic hijinks.

But odds are that you’ve seen and heard a lot less from Inside the NBA this year. And there are a couple of obvious reasons for that.

First is the ESPN schedule.

When ESPN revealed the Inside the NBA calendar for the 2025-2026 season, it only included 20 dates. That included just four shows before Christmas Day coverage. That’s not exactly the way you want to announce a huge partnership and that the famed program was back and better than ever before. In fact, Inside the NBA made just one scheduled appearance between the season’s opening night and Christmas. Between October 23 and December 25, Inside the NBA appeared just once on November 12.

ESPN executive Burke Magnus even admitted that the current agreement with TNT calls for the majority of appearances to take place after January 1 and that the network is hoping for a more regular schedule next year.

Even Charles Barkley, who has made it clear in the past how much of a fan he is of limited schedules, complained that ESPN wasn’t working him hard enough under the new setup. Who knew load management would be an issue affecting the broadcasters?

But it hasn’t just been the lack of dates; it’s also been the lack of time when Inside the NBA has been on the air.

Most Inside the NBA episodes have accompanied ABC Saturday primetime coverage. But the network window has not allowed the show to do what they do best and riff into the deep hours of the night. At TNT, the only broadcast conflicts were reruns of Law & Order or Charmed; it could go well into the night after a late doubleheader. That’s not the same for over-the-air affiliates.

NBA social media guru Rob Perez has been vocal all season about these issues, namely the limited scope of Inside the NBA, the few times it has been on the air.

“That episode tonight felt like a movie sequel only made because the original was so popular,” Perez wrote on January 25. “It does fine at the box office, a couple cheap laughs hitting on the nostalgia of the characters, but has no cultural relevance/staying-power once the marketing campaign ends. I understand the why, being broadcast on ABC and needing to get to local news for the affiliates because the game ran late, but what made this program so successful for so long was their ability to improv a basketball variety show.”

Now that they have been on the air, Inside the NBA has been their same selves as seen in their highlight package from their first season at ESPN. The same jokes, the same laughs, the same everything. There has just been much less of it.

The good news for ESPN is that when it has been on the air, people have tuned in. Inside the NBA averaged 1.3 million viewers this year, which would more than double what it would typically produce on TNT. But it’s fair to ask if that’s a product of increased popularity or greater broadcast exposure and much tighter windows. Because on the whole, there has been exasperation when it comes to learning the league’s new television schedule.

For years, Inside the NBA benefited from a consistency. You knew exactly when and where to find it on TNT. In recent years, it has been on Tuesday nights during football season and on Thursday nights after the NFL season ends.

Now, NBA fans are dealing with a whole new world where games are split between ESPN, NBC, Peacock, and Amazon Prime Video on brand new nights. Despite the NBA and its broadcasters’ best efforts to train fans, it’s going to take years for them to become comfortable with the new rhythm. It’s something that Charles Barkley himself has brought up this season.

“It is so difficult for fans to find the games now. I think we’ve done a disservice to the fans and to the game,” Barkley said.

Back to the ESPN schedule, the same was true for Inside the NBA. Unless you bookmarked their calendar of appearances, you would have had a difficult time trying to track when exactly they were on the air. After January 1, Inside aired seven times on Saturdays, four times on Sundays, three times on Fridays, and even once on a Wednesday.

That constant movement can be one explanation for why the show hasn’t felt as impactful this year. Ironically, it’s one of the reasons why the ESPN SEC package has been so successful. ABC features a non-stop day of college football where fans don’t have to change the channel and can watch three great matchups. Meanwhile, the Big Ten sends fans scrambling for their remotes among Fox, CBS, and NBC every weekend. Simplicity and convenience are hugely underrated among sports fans, and their viewing habits have been completely upended this season.

The result is a snowball effect, with the first season of Inside the NBA feeling muted. Fewer shows and less airtime mean fewer clips and less buzz, even if more people have watched each individual episode.

As the 2026 NBA Playoffs begin, Inside the NBA will be on the air on Saturday following the ABC primetime showdown between the Houston Rockets and Los Angeles Lakers. ESPN says in a press release that additional postgame coverage may appear on ESPN. It begins a stretch in which ESPN has said the foursome will work every single playoff game for the network all the way through the NBA Finals.

Hopefully, that means Inside the NBA will be able to reconnect with fans once again through a regular, reliable postseason schedule. Hopefully, EJ, Charles, Kenny, and Shaq are well-rested and ready to give us some epic entertainment throughout the postseason. Most importantly, hopefully their presence will lift ESPN’s NBA playoff coverage, which has left much to be desired in recent years. The quicker we can all forget about the studio coverage during last year’s NBA Finals, the better.

If Inside the NBA can deliver every night during the playoffs, then, much like the league itself, some of the complaints about the regular season will quickly be forgotten. It may have been a quiet several months, but this is what we’ve waited for ever since ESPN signed on to save Inside the NBA. The playoffs are finally here. It’s time to go to work.

About Matt Yoder

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