The sports media world was stunned on Saturday night when not only was it revealed that the NBA settled their lawsuit with Warner Bros. Discovery but that ESPN would be able to license the beloved studio show Inside the NBA for their basketball coverage beginning next season.

The licensing deal for Inside the NBA keeps the best studio show in television alive. After all the drama of the last several months, wondering about Charles Barkley’s retirement status, how the show could possibly exist without NBA rights at TNT, and the poison pills in the WBD-NBA lawsuit, it’s unbelievable that we could actually arrive at this point.

There’s no underselling this deal—it’s one of the biggest in the industry’s history. Not only will ESPN begin airing the best studio show in the medium, but it will also immediately solve one of its biggest weaknesses, which has plagued it for years.

If you can’t beat ’em, license ’em!

While the dust settles from the deal and we prepare for the previously unimaginable, here are our five biggest questions for Inside the NBA coming to ESPN.

1) How will this work exactly?

Not many details about Inside the NBA‘s license to ESPN beginning next season are known. According to SBJ’s Tom Friend, it could be a scenario where ESPN gets to air the show during significant events like Opening Week, Christmas Day, and throughout the NBA Playoffs and Finals.

If it’s a hybrid model where Inside the NBA airs on both TNT and ESPN throughout the season, it will be confusing for NBA fans. It would also create an awkward dynamic in Bristol, where the crew from another network gets to supplant the actual ESPN production for the biggest games of the year.

With WBD maintaining access to NBA highlights over the course of the new media contracts as part of their lawsuit settlement with the NBA, Inside the NBA could air in its current format on TNT during most weeks. And that’s likely to be a key piece of the licensing deal and settlement to give TNT some continued relevancy.

But what nights that would be, when the show would air on TNT and ESPN, and how it would fit with the other NBA media partners all seem to be up in the air. It’s another example of our increasingly fragmented sports marketplace, where fans need to keep their own running calendar to find out where to find things.

2) Will ESPN let Inside the NBA be themselves?

While ESPN has always been plagued by a rotating door of personalities on its NBA studio coverage, one of the biggest problems has always been the structure of the shows themselves. Namely, there are more commercials than anything else. During the NBA Finals last year, the studio crew got a little over a minute of airtime at halftime — one minute! That simply cannot happen with Inside the NBA, which succeeds because of its extended free-flowing nature.

ESPN has been very hands-off when it comes to licensing The Pat McAfee Show, so we can only hope that it will be a similar setup here with Inside the NBA. And early reports indicate that TNT will maintain production and creative control over the show even when it airs on ESPN, so we can hopefully expect that to be the case.

It will be a surreal experience to finally watch Inside the NBA at the NBA Finals, and a dream come true for basketball fans. Let’s all pray that ESPN allows the Inside guys the bandwidth to allow for extended coverage and conversations instead of giving them ridiculous time constraints to try to fit into when it airs the program. Otherwise, it will be the biggest waste of money in sports this side of Deshaun Watson’s guaranteed contract.

3) What effect does it have on Stephen A. Smith?

Here’s a potentially massive knock-on effect of Inside the NBA coming to ESPN: What happens with Stephen A. Smith? SAS has been the central focus of ESPN’s NBA studio coverage in recent years, even going to ridiculous levels of showing him walking into the arena like he was one of the players!

ESPN shows Jalen Brunson, Tyrese Haliburton, and… Stephen A. Smith (???) arriving at MSG for Knicks-Pacers Game 7. Is Stephen A. playing in the game?!? pic.twitter.com/67oD6CWh4Z

— Awful Announcing (@awfulannouncing) May 19, 2024

Will ESPN want Stephen A. Smith to be part of the Inside the NBA crew, or will the TNT crew truly be allowed to exist in its own universe? Smith has made some crossover appearances on TNT before and seems to be friendly with them. But it would certainly change the dynamic if his very large personality tried to fit in on a regular basis with such a well-oiled machine.

If he is not part of ESPN’s Inside the NBA telecasts, Stephen A. Smith suddenly becomes a bit less of an omnipresent personality. Sure, if it’s a part-time deal, SAS will still get plenty of airtime with a proverbial second crew. But it suddenly becomes a much smaller part of ESPN’s NBA operation.

And with SAS’s contract coming up and the sides reportedly not that close on money, it might make it a bit easier for ESPN to let Stephen A. walk with Barkley, Shaq, EJ, and Kenny on board for their biggest NBA games.

4) Will there be crossover opportunities?

The ESPN licensing deal for The Pat McAfee Show is the blueprint for how licensing deals have worked for ESPN to bring the biggest personalities to the network. But ESPN has also employed McAfee as a guest on First Take and as part of College GameDay. While those might be separate deals (remember McAfee was publicly tormented about his decision on whether or not to return to GameDay this year), it certainly opens the door for a more integrated working relationship.

Although the Inside the NBA team will remain under contract to WBD and have opportunities to expand their wings on their networks, it makes all the sense in the world for ESPN to want to use Charles Barkley and company however much they can now that they are in business together – whether it be SportsCenter, Get Up, First Take, digital content, or what have you.

Similarly, ESPN has a pretty deep bench in NBA coverage, including Malika Andrews, Kendrick Perkins, Richard Jefferson, Tim Legler, Monica McNutt, Chiney Ogwumike and new insider Shams Charania. Several of them were signed to new contracts before the new season began. Will any of them be integrated into Inside the NBA at various points, or will they have to settle for secondary roles at the network?

5) How do NBC and Amazon respond?

If Inside the NBA were going to be licensed, the conventional wisdom would be that it would go to one of the NBA’s new media rights partners, which would have to build from scratch, either NBC or Amazon. However, that is not the case, and NBC and Amazon will have to start from square one in trying to build a worthy competitor for the best studio show around.

Amazon has been able to build up a studio for Thursday Night Football, while NBC has done the same for its Big Ten college football coverage, and the roster has mostly consisted of new names. NBC has added Jalen Rose for its Big Ten basketball coverage, so that may be a starting point for them.

But right now, with Inside the NBA locked up and moving to ESPN, it’s going to be a challenge for both media companies to be able to come close to matching the star power and chemistry that Inside the NBA has built up over the years.