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Stephen A. Smith believes TNT “dropped the ball” in its attempt to keep the NBA on its airwaves after its current rights deal expires after this upcoming season.
The NBA announced on Wednesday that TNT “did not match the terms” of a bid by Amazon to stream the NBA beginning with the 2025-26 season and that the Prime Video streaming platform would be one of the league’s new broadcast partners.
Smith took to his eponymous podcast to criticize TNT’s brass for its handling of the situation, which the talking head explained had been an issue dating years back when they expressed that the NBA rights were “unimportant.”
The ESPN “First Take” personality said he had heard from sources that NBA commissioner Adam Silver had met with the execs from Warner Bros. Discovery — TNT’s parent company — to express that they needed to match another offer.
“There was a bunch of hemming and hawing,” Smith explained about the reaction from executives at the network. “See that’s why [Charles] Barkley has been going off, because he knew and still knows it never had to come to this.”
Smith heaped praise on TNT’s studio show “Inside the NBA,” which has garnered near-universal praise over the years thanks to its lovable cast of Charles Barkley, Kenny Smith, Shaquille O’Neal and Ernie Johnson.
The sports talking head hoped that another network would pick up the four and bring them over to cover the NBA, despite Barkley announcing his plan to retire after this coming season.
Smith also cast some doubt of the future of TNT as a whole.
“All I can say is I don’t where [TNT] goes from here. I mean how many episodes off ‘Law & Order’ can you air?” Smith said. “I’m just trying to figure it out, along with some of your other programming. You need something live, you need something fresh. How many old movies can you air? So it’s going to be real interesting to see what they do beyond next season.”
He added: “The last days of TNT, the NBA on TNT, is arriving next season.”
TNT isn’t likely to go down without a legal fight, and a fiery statement released Wednesday said the network believed the NBA “grossly misinterpreted our contractual rights with respect to the 2025-26 season and beyond, and we will take appropriate action.”
