We are now just days away from Inside the NBA making its highly anticipated debut on ESPN for the 2025-2026 NBA season.
Throughout the entire offseason, ESPN has maintained committed to keeping the beloved NBA studio show as is. That means no Stephen A. Smith drowning out everyone on set. It means allowing Charles Barkley and the entire cast the freedom and flexibility and time to do what they do best. And it means not over-producing or over-commercializing shows. And it keeping the same formula in place that has made it one of the most popular pieces of sports programming ever created.
That apparently includes the graphics and music.
According to ESPN senior vice president of production Tim Corrigan in comments given to Austin Karp of the Sports Business Journal, when ESPN says everything with the show is staying the same, that means everything.
“We’ve had meetings that are production to production, sales to sales, marketing to marketing, integration groups, formatting groups. We met with the executives on several occasions, we met with the talent face-to-face in Atlanta, and it’s been terrific,” he noted.
The plan remains the same in keeping “Inside the NBA” filmed from the same TNT studio it had been out of in Atlanta with the same cast, music, graphics producer, director and support staff around it.
There has been skepticism ever since this arrangement was announced that ESPN could resist the temptation to leave Inside the NBA alone without putting their own stamp on it. It was the exact same thing when we saw sheer panic from football fans over the equity deal with the NFL and the news that ESPN would begin distributing NFL RedZone when that news was finalized. Perhaps that says more about sports fans and their current relationship with ESPN than it does about any specific plan from the network.
But it is refreshing to know that ESPN seems fully committed to following through on what they promised with Inside the NBA. But honestly, why stop there? Can anyone actually identify the ESPN NBA theme? The only music you can really identify with the NBA on ESPN is their use of Barry White and other classic hits. Couldn’t ESPN just take the NBA on TNT theme song and begin using it over on ESPN?
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