Last July, the National Basketball Association announced a new eleven-year media-rights agreement with Amazon, NBC, and ESPN, set to take effect at the start of next season. Notably left out of the seventy-six-billion-dollar deal was Warner Bros. Discovery, the owner of TNT, which has held league-broadcasting rights since the late nineteen-eighties. The news alarmed many N.B.A. viewers: what would happen to the greatest studio sports show ever? It’s likely that “Inside the NBA,” on TNT, has surpassed the nineteen-nineties heyday of ESPN’s “SportsCenter,” John Madden’s mid-two-thousands years on “Monday Night Football,” and Michael Wilbon and Tony Kornheiser’s ongoing debate, “Pardon the Interruption.” It has done so by the steady accretion of talent and team chemistry. An affable former TV-news reporter named Ernie Johnson began hosting “Inside” in 1990, a year into the show’s existence, and the Hall of Famers Charles Barkley and Shaquille O’Neal came along in the new millennium. But it was the arrival of Kenny (The Jet) Smith, a two-time N.B.A. champ and former Basketball Times College Player of the Year, in 1998, that enabled the show to begin living up to its insider-y name.
Read Full Article »
