Charles Barkley’s unfiltered thoughts on Utah, the Jazz, winter sports, and the psyche of the modern NBA player

In a small room in Salt Lake City’s The Complex event venue, Charles Barkley sat on an extremely short couch.

Five feet away on an ultra-high stool sat Barkley’s Inside The NBA cohost, Kenny Smith. NBA legend Shaquille O’Neal, meanwhile, found himself in a standard chair some 7 feet away. And in their own spots, the group of three held court: each surrounded by a group of five or six media members asking about anything and everything at the start of All-Star Weekend.

Despite having retired from the NBA 10 to 25 years ago, Barkley, Smith, and O’Neal are three of the biggest names in basketball, still huge stars in their own right. But the secret to their success — Inside The NBA is widely recognized as this era’s pre-eminent sports show — is not their excellence, but instead their authenticity.

Where other shows provide buttoned-down, slick but extremely rote coverage of their sport (think of every NFL pregame show), the TNT crew (along with emcee Ernie Johnson) always give an unfailingly honest — if not always accurate — assessment of everything they see: the games, the players, the owners, you name it. Their show is less functional than fun.

And so perhaps the situation in SLC was the best possible microcosm of the Inside The NBA experience — chairs helter-skelter in a wildly informal setup, as the most famous analysts in basketball said things others would choose, perhaps wisely, to steer clear of.

Barkley backstage

As final preparations for the show went on all around them, the three former players gave their takes. Barkley, as always, had the best lines. Frankly, there’s no better way to capture the man than by letting his words stand alone.

Here’s Barkley on winter sports:

“Black people don’t ski, I keep telling y’all that. We don’t do cold stuff. I’m not good at anything that’s cold. But you know, when I looked at the weather report, it’s actually gonna be pretty good, comparable to what it could be.”

And, relatedly, on Salt Lake City:

“Well, this is an underrated city. I think Salt Lake is a fabulous city. Obviously, I’ve been coming here a long time. Looks like the weather’s gonna be decent. But they got great fans here.”

Does Barkley think NBA players want to come to Salt Lake City?

“Let’s be realistic, there are very few places people want to go. I mean, nobody ever said I want to — no disrespect — you use Utah, but I don’t remember people saying ‘let me go to San Antonio, or Indiana, or Sacramento.’ So you just have to really draft well. Y’all got 102 draft picks, so you just got to hit on your draft picks.”

What does Barkley think about high-profile fan incidents in Utah, including allegations that one fan used “excessive and derogatory verbal abuse” toward Russell Westbrook in 2019?

“These players today are a little too sensitive — I mean, this notion that you can get fans tossed out now. It depends on what the fan said, but just because the fan is saying something to you that you might not like — I think the NBA is going overboard when you toss fans out the game. Now racial slurs, homophobic slurs, things like that, cannot be tolerated. But I’d have to hear somebody say something really outrageous for a fan to get tossed. I mean, we would have been playing in front of empty arenas.”

Here’s Barkley on load management:

“These guys got the best doctors, the best shoes, and everything — and they make $30, $40, $50 million a year! I don’t think that’s a lot to ask (for them to play), do you? People always got hurt, but they didn’t just sit out just because they wanted to. There’s a difference between being hurt and load management. We survived playing in Chuck Taylors and flying commercial, and for a lot less money.

“To make all that money, you have an obligation to the fans. I wouldn’t mind cashing those $30, $40 million checks, for that I think I could suffer through 35 minutes on the basketball court. They ain’t steelworkers.”

Or Barkley on players’ trade demands:

“You can’t take my money and say you want to divorce me in six months to a year, because you can only get the max from this team. You can’t take all my money, then say ‘hey, I want a divorce.’ So I’m pretty sure that’s the next thing that’s gonna come out of the CBA. I have no doubt in my mind that these guys are gonna get locked out. These owners, you can’t take all their money and treat these owners and fans like crap. No doubt in my mind these guys are gonna get locked out, because these owners aren’t going to be standing for this.”

And these were the fireworks before the show began.

Creating the show

The Complex isn’t a TV set. But for its Inside The NBA show before All-Star Weekend in Salt Lake City, the TNT team had three clear needs in an area close to downtown, and The Complex fit the bill. They needed:

• a concert stage, where they could host Wiz Khalifa and Chloe Bailey concerts on Thursday night during the show itself;

• an indoor venue, where they can run and host a TV show, regardless of what the weather conditions would turn out to be;

• and an outdoor set, where they could link the show to its setting: the snowy wonderland of Utah.

Forget that there wasn’t much snow still on the ground downtown. The Inside the NBA production team, helmed by senior director Sarah Phillips, trucked in enough snow to make a makeshift tubing hill on the set, with propane heaters and trees all around.

Overall, about 200 employees worked since Monday to make the three-part show happen. Some are TNT employees based in Atlanta, but much of the crew was hired from the Utah region. For All-Star Weekend overall, the team has 12 broadcast trucks — two at The Complex, 10 at the Salt Palace — to direct, produce, and distribute the coverage worldwide.

For a couple of weeks, their team promoted the event on radio stations and on Instagram; over 1200 fans streamed in to fill the venue to its altered capacity. Some were there for Khalifa and the concert, but most chose to surround the desk of O’Neal, Johnson, Smith, and Barkley.

“We usually fill it out as much as we can,” Phillips said. “Like, we want that energy. We want people to experience the show in that way.”

That being said, they have to keep up that energy for a long time. An hour and a half before the show began at 5 p.m. dozens of Utah basketball fans were already lined up on the sidewalk, waiting to get in. Some didn’t leave until 11:30 p.m. when the show went off the air. As a result, the Inside The NBA crew has to have DJs perform, run contests, and more. The team set up a shooting contest on a basketball half-court, along with some pop-a-shot stations and some giveaways to keep the vibe alive.

And they did, until the end of the show, when it was time to slide down that artificial tubing hill. To their credit, the pair of Johnson and Smith were game, eventually pushing over the edge and falling to the cheers of the crowd. O’Neal dithered, worried he would pop the tubes, and finally stood to the side.

That left Barkley alone at the top of the hill. He stood center stage — and skipped the chance to sled to end the program, as the remaining fans sent hearty boos his way.

It shouldn’t have been a surprise. Barkley’s always honest, and you know how he feels about winter sports.