The thing we love most about Charles Barkley is his brutal honesty, even when it comes to his own network’s detriment.
TNT aired a doubleheader on Thursday night that featured none of the usual suspects. The network aired the Toronto Raptors and Chicago Bulls in the early game and the Memphis Grizzlies and Minnesota Timberwolves in the late game. At least it wasn’t Wizards-Knicks, right?
Unfortunately for TNT, none of those teams have big followings and fanbases. Maybe the Bulls once did, but they’ve been a bit of a disaster for a while now. The other three teams are some of the smallest markets in the league. In addition, only Minnesota is a really good team this year, leading the Western Conference. Memphis is out of playoff contention with Ja Morant out for the rest of the season. And Chicago and Toronto are both languishing under .500 with the Raptors just trading away All-Star Pascal Siakim to Indiana.
It probably didn’t help that TNT shared those records on the screen with a “Coming up next on TNT” tease. So when it came time to get everyone pumped up for the Raptors-Bulls game, Sir Charles told it like it is.
https://twitter.com/awfulannouncing/status/1748142706537517326
“Hey guys, I know we got the Bulls and the Raptors, but watch anyway!” Barkley said.
Ernie Johnson then added the “On TNT!” kicker which was just the icing on the cake.
In fairness to both teams, it actually ended up being a pretty fun game. The Bulls won on the road 116-110 thanks to 24 points each from DeMar DeRozan and Nikola Vucevic to crawl within three games of the #8 seed. At least for TNT, Anthony Edwards did this in the late game.
https://twitter.com/thecomeback/status/1748206214809534782
