If you’ve been keeping up with NBA news, there’s a good chance you’re aware that JJ Redick and Charles Barkley recently got into a spat.

You might know that Redick, in a talk with reporters, said that the media hasn’t done a good enough job of celebrating the NBA, stating, “If I’m a casual fan and you tell me every time I turn on the television that the product sucks, well, I’m not going to watch the product. And that’s really what has happened over the last 10 to 15 years.”

You might also know that Barkley – who inferred that Redick’s criticism was partly aimed at him – fired back by saying that Redick was doing a lousy job coaching the Lakers and was a “dead man walking.” But what you might not know is what Barkley said before that insult, which got less attention but was actually far more remarkable. Barkley said, “[Redick] said something about we’re the reason people ain’t watching this crappy product we got … yeah, us, like we’re out there jacking up 100 threes a night.”

holy shit charles barkley just went IN on JJ Redick😭😭😭 pic.twitter.com/QZZ94hTSJP

— KingCharge (@KingCharge) January 3, 2025

It’s worth taking a second to break down the significance of that retort. Here was Charles Barkley, the single most prominent NBA media member in the world, using the platform afforded to him by the NBA to argue with a member of the league for insisting that the NBA is actually good.

Barkley, who, again, said this in the middle of an NBA telecast, was literally telling viewers that the NBA product was “crappy” and that anyone who was deciding not to watch the sport was justified in doing so.

Far from advocating for the league, Barkley was using his time on the air to vehemently insist that the NBA, a sport he’s paid to cover, now sucks.

It was an incredible moment not only because Barkley ironically proved exactly what Redick had been talking about, but because the moment barely even registered with viewers, who have grown so accustomed to NBA media members trashing the league that Barkley saying on air that the product is “crappy” didn’t even stand out as newsworthy.

In other words, it was a remarkable quote because it wasn’t remarkable.

In any other league, a member of the media getting on the mic and trashing the sport during a broadcast to that degree would be not just unlikely but unimaginable; under no circumstances would the NFL, for example, ever tolerate something like that. ESPN’s college football coverage drew criticism far and wide for its negative coverage during the first weekend of the College Football Playoff.

But in the NBA, criticism of the product by its own partners is not just routine but overwhelming, not only by Barkley – who criticizes the league constantly – but by a majority of his peers, including Inside the NBA colleague Shaquille O’Neal, who recently went on a podcast and described the NBA as “shit” and “fucking terrible.”

Even the talking heads who don’t literally say they hate the league nonetheless bash it incessantly by skewering the life out of its players and endlessly debating if any of them are good. The negativity surrounding the league’s media presence is so pronounced, in fact, that even being the best player in the league can’t save you from getting ripped to shreds.

In the year following Nikola Jokic’s back-to-back MVPs, Stephen A Smith – the No. 1 analyst on the league’s primary broadcast partner – spent much of that year referring to Jokic as a “tub of lard.” And when it was announced on TNT in 2024 that Jokic had won the MVP again, Shaq went on an on-air hissy-fit about how wrong the award was and then felt the need to tell Jokic himself, to his face via live satellite, that the award should have gone to Shai Gilgeous-Alexander instead.

“I understand that this big tub of lard that can’t jump onto a curb is unstoppable… I love Nikola Jokic. It’s just unbelievable to watch him… He ain’t harder to guard than Steph Curry.”

Agree with Stephen A. Smith? 🤔

(via @FirstTake)pic.twitter.com/GnIeOXi42h

— ClutchPoints (@ClutchPoints) June 6, 2023

Almost no other sport has a media dynamic even remotely as self-defeating as this, in which the most prominent people enlisted to cover it are not merely failing to promote it but are actively playing defense against it.

It’s the end result of the NBA allowing its discourse to become completely driven by hot-takers over the years – in no small part to Charles Barkley, whose success on Inside the NBA encouraged ESPN to showcase outspoken, bombastic personalities on their NBA panels as well.

Before you knew it, it became hard to find even a single analyst on an NBA studio show who wasn’t saying wild and outlandish things all the time.

But there are two intrinsic problems with hot-takers. One is that hot-takers tend to be extremely negative, as the very nature of their profession is to come off as aggrieved and upset and complain-y about everything they see. The other is that hot-takers almost never have hot takes about micro, granular, or hyper-specific topics that require studiously following something. Hot takes tend to be about the macro, the broad picture. They’re always along the lines of “Is LeBron better than Jordan?” or “Who’s career is better, Steph’s or Kobe’s?” – which is really, really bad because when the threshold to discuss the league is that low, anyone can keep up with it, including people who don’t even like the NBA that much.

Other leagues tend to filter out commentators who clearly don’t follow the sport, but the NBA has made it possible for someone like Shaq, who follows the league so inattentively that he didn’t even know what Pascal Siakam’s first name was as of 2021, to be one of the emcees for the league.

As the league’s coverage became more and more proliferated by hot-takers, it became more and more proliferated with personalities who are not only intensely critical of the sport but aren’t incentivized to actually keep up with it. (Indeed, ask NBA fans if they believe the TV hot-takers covering the sport are even following it and a whopping majority will say no, and not without merit.)

Over time, this has caused the NBA media ecosystem to become a satellite of negativity, one that endlessly crunches on the same vanilla topics again and again and again while increasingly hacking and slashing at the players instead of actually covering the actual game action. The negativity has seeped into the NBA fandom as well, which people have noted for years feels often joyless and dictated by commentators who are more interested in turning the league into a soap opera than following it as an athletic competition.

Glance at the biggest aggregators of league news and you’ll see as many manufactured stories about bickering and feuding and complaining amongst big NBA voices as you will about the games. Meanwhile, the league’s connection with the fans has gotten more and more frayed each year, to the extent that NBA fans don’t merely dislike the coverage of the league’s primary broadcaster but unabashedly despise it.

No sport has a more adversarial relationship with its own audience than the NBA, and rather than try to repair it, the league, in continuing to boost hot-takers, has instead allowed the basic sensibilities of people who don’t even respect the sport to seep into the overall coverage of the game broadcasts. Gradually, fans began to notice that the quality of the league’s presentation had fallen off a cliff. Suddenly there were ads on jerseys, ads on the floor, the uniforms were ugly, the NBA Finals games didn’t even feel like NBA Finals games anymore, and the commercial-free version of NBA League Pass was a staggering $280.

The league, glued in the trajectory of aligning their sensibilities with hot-takers, began taking their audience for granted. Soon, a feedback loop had formed in which both the fans of the NBA and the people covering it on television were in a perpetual state of unhappiness with it.

Then came Steph Curry.

The Warriors’ sharp shooter forever changed the way that basketball is played by showing that it can be advantageous to take a ton of threes, as the math simply incentivizes it if you’re proficient at it. The NBA has become a very different sport than it was a decade ago, and NBA hot-takers – people who had both largely skated on having to diligently follow the game and who had become emboldened to be as harsh towards the product as they wanted – when faced with the prospect of having to actually put the work in and adapt to this new era of basketball decided to take the easy route instead: they started explicitly crushing the NBA.

The latent negativity of the NBA media had been on display for a while, but it’s only in the last few years that it’s become a full-blown crisis for the league. It’s not uncommon now to hear the most prominent NBA media members saying, in no uncertain terms, how unwatchable they think the modern game is, so much so that the number one story of this NBA season hasn’t been anything that’s happened on the floor. It’s been ratings.

The TV ratings for the NBA are down this season, much as they’re down for almost every single sports league in a rapidly changing ecosystem in which fewer and fewer people are watching television. Even the mighty NFL saw its ratings drop in 2024, and yet the NBA’s TV media members have taken the league’s slipped viewership and turned it into a full-blown referendum about how awful they say the league’s product is.

Far from rooting for the league or defending it from attacks, the NBA’s most prominent media members have spent much of the year annihilating it – once again reverting to the mean of pushing narratives instead of genuinely covering the games, but this time doing it to the surreal extent of publicly advocating against the very thing they’re being paid to promote.

The message being sent from the NBA these days is basically “The NBA is bad,” and to whatever degree that the league’s ratings are disappointing, it’s not exactly a reach to see it more as a direct effect of the league’s own messaging than because the league, fresh off a $76 billion media rights deal, is really, suddenly in a horrible place.

It should go without saying that all of this needs to change. No one wants NBA media members to become total shills for the league, of course; no one reading this right now is demanding that the commentators referenced above be neutered from offering criticism.

At the same time, the reason people watch and follow the league is because they like it, and the least they deserve is to hear from voices who respect the NBA customers enough to not be spitting in their faces whenever they try to enjoy it. The NBA isn’t just a sport, it’s entertainment – and to JJ Redick’s point from earlier, why on Earth should an outsider express interest in this product right now when the representatives for it are not only failing to sell it but are doing the exact opposite?

Why should people pay attention to this league when it’s an open complaint among NBA journalists that the most prominent NBA analysts on TV aren’t really watching the games? Why should anyone tune in to a pregame show for a nationally-televised NBA game when the people producing them keep catering the product to others who don’t take the league seriously and only want to hear the same bland, pre-heated hot takes about the Knicks and the Lakers and LeBron vs. Jordan for the nineteen billionth time?

NBA fans deserve more credit than that. This league takes and takes and takes from fans while denying them the grace to merely treat them as anything other than philistines who can be sated by chucking the lowest common denominator at them, and it’s high time that changed – not just for the fans, but because this league is never going to grow the game of basketball as well or as far as it could so long as its default position is to view its audience as tasteless rubes who will just smile and nod along with every presentational shortcoming.

Are there reasons to be hopeful this could improve soon? Yes and no. NBC and Amazon getting broadcasting rights in 2025 will be huge because the NBA is about to get new, fresh voices presenting it for the first time in decades, and those voices are likely to be far, far more positive than the current guys. Which is a good thing.

At the same time, the NBA doesn’t seem to appreciate just how detrimental their media landscape is, nor do they seem the least bit motivated to correct it. I say this because they not only re-upped with ESPN as their primary broadcaster despite fans almost universally loathing their coverage, but they’ve gone so far as to radically increase the visibility of the Inside the NBA guys during the All-Star Game by making the new format include Shaq, Barkley and Kenny Smith selecting the teams for the game. The NBA’s plan to save the All-Star Game involves making the guys who just called the league “crappy” and “fucking terrible” the central figures of it.

And so long as the NBA is incapable of finding a better way to sell the product to people, we should expect to keep hearing about how bad the NBA is – from the NBA – for the foreseeable future.

[The author of this piece can be found on Bluesky @velodus]