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Charles Barkley does not appear to be interested in working at ESPN.
For the past month, there have been questions about what will happen with Inside The NBA if Warner Bros. Discovery/TNT lose the NBA rights to NBC.
During an interview with ESPN Cleveland’s “The Really Big Show,” Barkley revealed that he would become a free agent if WBD didn’t secure NBA rights.
“I covered my –, to be honest with you,” Barkley said. “I just signed a 10-year-deal two years ago, but one of the things I did was I put an opt-out in a couple years because I wanted to cover my ass when it comes to the situation.’’
“I said [to WBD during his last negotiations], ‘If you guys lose the NBA, I want to make sure I can get out of here,’” Barkley said. “So I am actually in a really great position. We knew it was going to be Amazon and Apple, but we didn’t know NBC was going to come out of the woodwork. … Listen, I love TNT, they’ve been great to me … I wanted to make sure that if we lost the NBA in two years, I could be a free agent.”
While ESPN would be the logical landing spot for Barkley, he’s not interested in working as hard as Pat McAfee and Stephen A. Smith do.
Via Jimmy Traina/ Sports Illustrated
“They’re not gonna work me like a dog,” Barkley said. “ESPN Radio, ESPN2, ESPN Deportes. I mean, HELL NO! As much as I love ESPN, I just turned 61. The notion that I’m going to be working like a dog into my mid-60s, that’s definitely not going to happen.”
Currently, ‘Inside The NBA’ is still set to go on for at least one more season at TNT before the next NBA rights deal goes into effect.
H/T Awful Announcing