Charles Barkley Goes Rogue in NBA Rights Fight

Since he engineered the merger of one of the biggest media and entertainment conglomerates, Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav has faced no shortage of criticism. He’s gotten it from shareholders who have chafed at Zaslav’s exorbitant compensation, which has remained high (almost $50 million last year) at a time when the company’s stock is low (currently around $8 a share). And he received plenty during last year’s strikes in Hollywood, where Zaslav became an avatar for a corporate class that is hostile to creatives.

Now he is taking it from one of his most high-profile employees. With Warner Bros. Discovery at risk of losing out on future NBA rights, Charles Barkley is throwing elbows in the direction of Zaslav and the Warner Bros. Discovery C-suite. “These people I work with,” Barkley said last week during an interview on The Dan Patrick Show, “they’ve screwed this thing up, clearly.”

For the last 24 years, Barkley has been as celebrated as a broadcaster as he was during his legendary playing career. As a cohost of Inside the NBA on TNT, which is owned by Warner Bros. Discovery, Barkley has become a true national treasure, basketball’s own John Madden, with a singular style that veers from brutally honest to side-splittingly hilarious. Along with cohosts Kenny Smith, Ernie Johnson, and fellow Hall of Famer Shaquille O’Neal, Barkley has turned Inside the NBA into one of the most beloved programs on television. But with negotiations over the league’s next media rights deal reaching an advanced stage, there are growing indications that TNT will lose the NBA. Zaslav said Thursday that they are continuing to talk to the NBA, while highlighting the company’s other sports programming, a “full buffet of content around the world.”

But Inside the NBA is the main course for basketball fans, and its potential dissolution has led to criticism of Zaslav, with Barkley leading the charge. On The Dan Patrick Show, he called the company’s leadership “clowns” and “fools,” while lamenting that his colleagues on Inside the NBA suddenly face an uncertain future. “Morale sucks,” Barkley said with characteristic bluntness, “plain and simple.”

Like others, Barkley suspects that the NBA sent Zaslav to the doghouse for saying a couple years back that the company didn’t necessarily need the league. “The first thing is they came out and said, ‘We didn’t need the NBA.’ So, I think that probably pissed Adam off,” Barkley said, referring to NBA commissioner Adam Silver. “I don’t know that. But when we merged, that’s the first thing our boss said, ‘We don’t need the NBA.’ Well, he don’t need it. But me, Kenny, Shaq, Ernie, and the rest of the people who work there, we need it. It just sucks right now.”

An NBA spokesperson declined to comment.

Barkley continued to bring the heat in an interview that was released on Thursday, calling out Zaslav for leaving employees in the dark.

“They’ve done a really shitty job of keeping us abreast,” Barkley said on an episode of SI Media with Jimmy Traina. “Just say, ‘Hey, guys, we’re in the middle of negotiations. It’s 50-50.’ Just say something. We have not discussed it. And I don’t mean for me. The people who work there. They’re the ones on pins and needles. Just say something to let the people be able to breathe a little bit. I can’t imagine having a family and bills. Realistically, you probably gotta start looking for another job. You’re not gonna wait a year and get fired.”

Barkley said in the interview that he does not have a relationship with Zaslav. The two spoke briefly earlier this month at the Warner Bros. Discovery upfronts in New York, where Barkley and O’Neal both made cameos. “I met him twice,” Barkley said. “I saw him last week at the upfronts. He said hello and that was it. I thought he should’ve said something to us when he had us there, to be honest with you, and he didn’t.”

A Warner Bros. Discovery spokesperson declined to comment.

The NBA last re-upped its media rights deal in 2014, when it reached an agreement with incumbent rights-holders Disney, the owner of ABC and ESPN, and Time Warner, TNT’s parent company at the time, while both companies were still in the exclusive negotiating window with the league. This time around, the NBA emerged from that window without a deal inked. And while Disney is, by all accounts, still poised to retain its status as the lead rights-holder, new bidders have surfaced that threaten TNT. Amazon has reportedly positioned itself to grab a slice of the new media contract, while NBC now looks like the favorite to supplant TNT as holder of the NBA’s B-package. As an incumbent, TNT has matching rights, though, much like the negotiations, the particulars of that are opaque. Even to Barkley.

“I think this is our third negotiations and we’ve always signed during the exclusive window. It’s never come up for bidding,” Barkley said on the SI podcast. “Clearly Adam [Silver] is upset. I’m assuming he’s upset. Something is going on, to be honest with you, because if we have the right to match, it would be a simple—‘Yeah, we’re gonna match’ or ‘We’re not gonna match.’ That’s the thing that’s got us disturbed the most.”

Barkley revealed earlier this month that his contract has an opt-out should TNT lose rights to the league, prompting feverish industry-wide speculation over where he—and the rest of the Inside the NBA crew—may land in such an event. Puck reported this week that Barkley is “highly coveted by ESPN, NBC, and Amazon.” In the interview with Patrick, Barkley was receptive to the idea of housing the show under his own production company.

In the coming weeks, the NBA will officially crown a new champion. Whether it will have consummated a new media deal by then remains to be seen. But in the meantime, Barkley is showing no signs of muzzling his criticism of Zaslav. The New York Times published an interview with Barkley this week, noting that he spoke to the paper despite “several attempts by security and public relations officials to prevent him” from doing so, and over objections from Smith. “It’s people’s lives,” Barkley told the Times. “Not my life. Not Ernie’s life. Not Kenny’s life. Not Shaq’s life. But all the people who work here. We probably have 100 people who do work on the show. So they’re, like, real people. I’ve seen their kids born, graduate high school, graduate college.”

And Barkley said in Thursday’s podcast interview that his bosses at Warner Bros. Discovery have not called him over his recent comments. “They know better,” he said.

If this is the end for Barkley at TNT, he is offering a parting reminder of what made him such a success there.