Inside the NBA was long not just one of the most beloved sports shows, but one of the top things on television overall. The halftime and postgame show that covers the NBA was broadcast on TNT from 1989 to 2025. The show is hosted by Ernie Smith and includes Charles Barkley, Kenny Smith, and Shaquille O’Neal as analysts. This season, the highly acclaimed show moved over to ESPN.
The move has coincided with a worse product than ever before. The once-universally loved show has received a lot more criticism this year. Scheduling restraints have played a big part in the show’s regression. There were only 20 episodes broadcast during the regular season. Bill Simmons has been one of the biggest critics of the new-look show.
“It’s the first time they’ve really had backlash, and I don’t know how much of it’s fair and how much of it isn’t fair, but they’ve also been in everybody’s life for such a long time that it’s kind of, [there] is an inevitable way that this could probably end,” Simmons said. “But the whole thing has felt off the whole year. I love that show, but the ESPN fit, some of the time that they have, the fact that they don’t have the same time they had after the games, which is when I really thought that show was at its most important.”
Simmons believes O’Neal is partly to blame as well, though. The vibes as a whole have been different on Inside the NBA this year, and Simmons believes O’Neal, whose humor and analysis took the show to new heights in 2011, hasn’t been holding up his end of the bargain.
“And to me, Shaq is the biggest issue with the show,” Simmons continued. “It seems like he’s there because it’s fun to be on the show, but it doesn’t seem like he follows basketball at a high enough level anymore. Like, he doesn’t know who people like Baylor Scheierman are. You’re on a studio show covering a sport, you know? There has to be some sort of a modicum of following the game.”
Simmons critiques are fair. While O’Neal’s banter and friendly rivalry with Barkley has long been a staple of Inside the NBA, the all-time great center is caught far too often coming up short when it comes to actually knowing what is going on in the modern state of the game. He often is unaware of who the players are, and his basketball takes have been questioned far more often recently. O’Neal is a fan-favorite on Inside the NBA, and everybody hopes that he can return to form next season.
Inside the NBA was long not just one of the most beloved sports shows, but one of the top things on television overall. The halftime and postgame show that covers the NBA was broadcast on TNT from 1989 to 2025. The show is hosted by Ernie Smith and includes Charles Barkley, Kenny Smith, and Shaquille O’Neal as analysts.
