Charles Barkley declares this season will be the last for him and Ernie Johnson on ‘Inside the NBA’

We’re six weeks out from the start of another NBA season, which means it’s time for the annual tradition of Charles Barkley retirement watch.

Barkley notably returned to Inside the NBA even after TNT Sports lost NBA broadcast rights and licensed the show to ESPN, and was part of the show’s coverage of its first-ever NBA Finals. But in an appearance this week on The Bill Simmons Podcast, Barkley revealed that he expects this season to not only be his last, but also the last for Inside‘s beloved anchor, Ernie Johnson.

“Me and Ernie are a package deal,” Barkley said. “So right now, unless Ernie changes his mind, next year is my last year 100 percent.”

Before Barkley’s comments, it was not publicly known that Johnson, 70, was planning to retire after the season. In Barkley’s telling, that timeline was part of a pitch Johnson made to him after ESPN got rights to Inside.

The Hall of Famer reiterated to Simmons that the main factor behind his decision to return was to act as a bridge to the ESPN era and allow the show’s longtime staff members to keep their jobs. While Johnson has cut back on his MLB postseason and March Madness hosting duties in recent years, he has not announced a retirement timeline.

But Barkley has teased retirement each offseason for several years now, often as part of what seemed like a public negotiation for a new contract. Almost a decade ago, Barkley made a public show of his intention to retire at 60, when his previous contract ended.

“I told TNT I was going to retire at 60. And they were like, ‘Oh, he’s full of sh*t. He’s not gonna retire,'” Barkley recalled this week.

“So we come up, I said, ‘Hey guys, it’s my last year.’ They’re like, ‘What do you mean?’ I said, ‘I told y’all six years ago I was gonna retire at 60.’ They’re like, ‘ You were serious?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I was serious.’ Then they said to me, ‘Do us a favor. Stay two more years, ’til we get the new deal.’ I talked it over with my friends. I said, ‘OK, I’ll tell you what. I’ll stay ’til 62,’ which was last year … little did I know these f*cking idiots was gonna lose the NBA.”

Barkley said he was happy to give up his chair to a frequent fill-in panelist like Jalen Rose or Jamal Crawford, but TNT didn’t want to let him go while they were in talks on a new broadcast deal with the league. So in 2022, Barkley agreed to stay on, only for TNT to ultimately lose its package to Prime Video. Barkley teased retirement again in 2024 — apparently under a clause in his contract allowing him to leave the network if it lost game rights — but ultimately returned.

Once it became clear TNT would no longer air NBA games, Barkley said he met with both NBC and Amazon. The former offered him a contract with a considerable raise.

“I could have gone to NBC and made more money if I was concerned about money,” he told Simmons this week. “NBC offered me more money than I was making at Turner.”

Given the legendary broadcaster’s tendency to change his mind month to month — and have it changed for him with offers of higher pay — we are a long way from a Barkley retirement tour. However, if Johnson were actually to depart the show, it could be a natural transition for Barkley and Inside overall.

Many questions remain about the arrangement between TNT and ESPN around Inside. For now, ESPN licenses the show. Last season, Kenny Smith signed a side deal with the Worldwide Leader to appear on its other programming. Could ESPN look to take the show over entirely in the future? How could the looming Warner Bros. Discovery takeover by Paramount Skydance affect TNT Sports’ interest in the current setup? And what would happen to TNT’s considerable Big 12 inventory, which it gained as part of a trade with ESPN for the rights to Inside, if the networks ended the deal?

Neither side has commented publicly on the length of the agreement. ESPN leadership has said it hopes to get Inside on the air more this season, but would it want a version of Inside without arguably its two most prominent faces?

Much hangs over Barkley and Johnson’s decisions, now that Barkley has once again put the ball in his bosses’ court as they look to make larger business decisions beyond NBA programming.