Shaq and Charles Barkley got into it after Game 4 of the Eastern Conference Finals in Boston on Tuesday night, but Ernie Johnson says it’s all pretty boring if you ask him. The Inside the NBA host said Thursday that all the attention an exchange between Barkley and O’Neil had was much ado about nothing.
Johnson joined The Dan Patrick Show on Thursday and said morale on the Inside the NBA set has “never been higher.”
I’m so amused at the response to that thing on social media. I’m traveling yesterday and looking at twitter and seeing people responding to this saying and I’m like ‘Have you not been watching the show?’ I’ve heard that exact same exchange 50 times this year.
Johnson then put on his Shaq and Barkley impressions to mimic a bit of the back-and-forth the two Hall of Famers had, which basically amounted to them threatening to get into a chicken wing fight. Stuck in the middle, Johnson and Kenny Smith went to eating the food in front of them.
“I really couldn’t let those crab cakes go,” Johnson said. “They were really good.”
Patrick asked again about the fight, but Johnson was set on dismissing it for the ordinary banter he hears around the set all the time.
I bailed on the whole exchange. I just started eating the food that they brought out. That’s a tired back and forth. There’s nothing there, that’s just guys doing what they do.
