Charles Barkley Blasts NBA's $77B Media Deal: 'We've Done A Disservice To The Fans'
The Hall of Famer unloaded on the NBA’s new broadcast landscape, saying the league has made it too hard for fans to track down game.
Charles Barkley is just like us — sick and tired of having to navigate an endless slew of streaming services just to find the game we want to watch.
The Hall of Famer appeared on ESPN's Pardon the Interruption on Friday and unloaded on the NBA's new 11-year, $77 billion media rights deal, which now spreads games across ESPN/ABC, NBC/Peacock and Amazon's Prime Video.
"It is so difficult for fans to find the games now," Barkley said. "I think we’ve done a disservice to the fans and to the game. We’ve got to find a way to let the fans know. Because the fans are the backbone, and we want to support these networks."
He added: "I’m so honored to be on ESPN … but people don’t even know when the NBC games are on NBC, when they’re Peacock. They don’t know when the game’s on Amazon."
Barkley included a word of caution about the long-term optics.
"We’ve got to be very careful because we’ve got an 11-year deal, and it’s a team deal," he said. "The players are gonna be successful, but we want the networks to be successful also."
He's not wrong about the confusion.
Gone are the days when NBA fans simply turned to TNT on Thursday or ABC on Sunday and settled in for the night. Now it's ESPN, ABC, NBC, Peacock, Prime Video. Plus, there's NBA TV and your local RSN if you're trying to follow your home team. Prime bounced from Friday nights to Thursdays. Peacock has Monday games. NBC rolled out Sunday night windows.
If you don't have the schedule posted to your fridge — and I'll go ahead and assume most of us don't — you're probably going to just have to Google where to find your team on any given night.
Or consult a carefully-crafted, color-coded chart.
Of course, this isn't just an NBA problem.
NFL fans have spent the past few seasons bouncing between CBS, FOX, NBC, ESPN, Prime Video, Netflix, Peacock and now even streaming-exclusive playoff games. Every time a game lands behind a new paywall, fans on social media grumble and yell at the clouds.
And every fall, the NFL continues to post monster numbers, anyway. Because NFL fans have proven they will weather any inconvenience to watch their games.
But Barkley's point is valid. Paying for multiple services — and having to keep track of which night belongs to which network — is objectively annoying.
The NBA, on the flipside, would argue that its product is now available on more platforms than ever, reaching more homes and more young viewers through streaming. The league has also paraded out some stats to suggest that ratings are actually up this year since the new media deal kicked in.
However, given the fact that Nielsen has changed its methodology in the past year, ratings are up across the board in every sport. So take that with a grain of salt.
Barkley’s warning is less about this season's numbers and more about the long game. The NBA is not the NFL. So even if it's working out now, at what point do fans get tired of paying more and more money to download more and more apps to watch the same regular season games that used to be included in their basic cable subscriptions?
That's the 77-billion-dollar question.