'Chuck is 100% done if EJ is leaving': Inside the NBA just entered its final season
Ernie Johnson gave himself a farewell year on his own terms. The contracts and quotes around him say the show won't outlast it in any recognizable form.
Ernie Johnson announced on October 28, in a three-minute video posted to X, that this season of Inside the NBA is his last. It's his 37th as host of a show that debuted in 1989; he is 70.
"Totally my decision. It's just time. It's been an honor to share so many nights, decades actually, with my brothers."
— Ernie Johnson, in his announcement video
He was careful with the wording — "Just to be clear, I'm not retiring. Just cutting back" — and he'll stay on March Madness for TNT and CBS while building a production company called 32 Bowties. So Johnson himself is fine. The show is the casualty, because the show's future was contractually welded to him months before he said a word.
Charles Barkley laid that out on The Bill Simmons Podcast in September: he stayed these last two years because Johnson personally asked him to, and "me and Ernie are a package deal." He left no room for interpretation — "If he says he's done, I'm gone." Barkley's 10-year, $210 million deal with TNT runs to 2032 on paper; his own stated exit runs exactly as long as Ernie's.
The expensive part
What turns this from a retirement story into a television-business story is how recently, and at what cost, this show was rescued. Warner Bros. Discovery lost NBA rights after four decades and sued the league in July 2024; the November 2024 settlement that ended the lawsuit had Inside the NBA at its center, licensed to air on ESPN and ABC while TNT Sports kept producing it in Atlanta. ESPN content chief Burke Magnus had called adding Barkley "a perfect world."
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The perfect world lasted one full season. ESPN built a licensing arrangement around a four-man chemistry, and within thirteen months of the settlement the man running that chemistry announced his exit, with the biggest star tied to him on the record. Shaq and Kenny Smith are performers; Johnson is the one who turns Shaq and Barkley's collisions into television instead of noise, and has been for 37 years. A show called Inside the NBA can certainly keep airing on ESPN after next spring. The thing the network settled a lawsuit to get cannot.
ESPN's settlement saved Inside the NBA in November 2024. The farewell season that ends it was announced before the arrangement turned two.
Whoever sits in Johnson's chair in fall 2027 inherits the name, the desk and, if Barkley means what he said, neither of the reasons the league's broadcast partners fought over this show in the first place.
Previously we wrote: Is The Lowdown a true story? The real man died in 2015 — and his family says FX is 'muddying fact and fiction'