Charles Barkley is one of the more outspoken people on sports television and that’s what everyone loves about him. Barkley speaks his mind and doesn’t hold back, which makes him the most entertaining member of the ‘Inside the NBA’ cast on TNT.
Barkley has spoken in the past about his dislike for some of the sports talk shows and he has had big issues with Skip Bayless, with Sir Charles even going so far as to say he’d kill the man. While that is definitely out of bounds to say something like that and there’s no way he ever does it, it’s fair to say, there is a reason why so many tend to dislike Bayless, as he tends to go overboard on his talk shows with his agendas.
Barkley was recently on the ‘Dan Patrick Show’ where he said that these days greater importance is given to individual accomplishments than team success and he blamed some people on television for starting the trend.
(from the 9:10 mark):
“I’m not sure how it got to the point where it became an individual thing instead of a team thing. Unfortunately, a couple of people on television started this probably, and it actually been for the detriment of the NBA because nobody told Michael Jordan after four or five years, you got to get out of here; you’re not going to win a championship. So things started getting crazy with LeBron and he started listening to all the rumors about you gotta win to be successful and then he went to Miami. Then it happened next with KD so it started somewhere back then.”
There can be little doubt that Bayless is one of the people that Barkley is talking about here. The topic of these television personalities being detrimental to the NBA has come up recently from another prominent voice as well. Kevin Durant also stated the same on Twitter a few days back, where he called out Bayless, Shannon Sharpe, and Stephen A. Smith for changing the game for the worse.
These guys are not going anywhere though, whether Barkley and KD like it or not. Many have also followed the example set by Bayless and giving out blazing hot takes is now the norm on television.
