ESPN has about a year to figure out how it’s going to handle Inside the NBA. As part of Warner Bros. Discovery’s deal to remain in the NBA’s media ecosystem, it was announced that Turner will continue to produce Inside, but license it out to ESPN, which solves the network’s longstanding issues trying to put together a pregame, halftime, and postgame NBA show that viewers enjoy.
An unsurprising question that popped up after this was whether Stephen A. Smith — who is in the middle of some high-profile contract negotiations with ESPN — would find a way onto the show. Smith is the guy ESPN has built its NBA coverage around, and while that has come under plenty of criticism, he’s famously close with the Inside crew and has appeared on it in the past. But apparently, as of now, the network doesn’t have any intetion of putting Stephen A. on their newest property.
“We have no plans to do that,” ESPN content president Burke Magnus told Jimmy Traina of Sports Illustrated. “And that’s because, frankly, the construct of the deal really doesn’t — that’s not how it was conceived. What is conceived is that Turner, as they have always done with this show, with this cast, with the people involved behind the scenes, are going to continue to do what they’ve always done. And we’re going to distribute it on the ESPN platform. Frankly, that’s exactly what we want. We don’t want to change it. We don’t want to interject new talent into it. We don’t want to really do anything to it.”
It is worth mentioning that the scuttlebutt around Smith’s contract negotiations revolves around him wanting to do more NFL stuff for ESPN, but considering how big Inside is and his relationship with the guys, it is fair to wonder if he’d want to have any sort of presence on the show as part of a new deal (if, of course, he comes to terms with the network on one). For now, the complexities of the deal with Turner gives ESPN a way to say they have no plans of putting him on Inside in any capacity, but we’ll certainly be waiting to see if that changes as Smith and ESPN sit down at the negotiating table.
(Via Awful Announcing)
