As the NBA has evolved toward a more spread-out, perimeter-style of play over the past two decades, Inside the NBA star Charles Barkley has been notoriously against teams’ reliance on the three-ball.
And as Barkley watched the San Antonio Spurs collapse at Madison Square Garden on Wednesday night in Game 4 of the NBA Finals, he felt undeniably vindicated, a fact he had no issue sharing on the postgame show immediately after the Spurs’ last-second loss.
San Antonio shot just 3-for-17 from behind the arc in the second half as they coughed up a 27-point halftime lead.
To Barkley, who resoundingly hammered the Spurs throughout the postgame show, the shooting performance was clear evidence that he was on the right side of his contentious debate with NBA fans over the years about the risks of the deep shot.
“In today’s NBA, any time us old guys says something, y’all like, we old, ‘get off my lawn’ guys,” Barkley said.
“Yo, those 3s were great, the first half. At some point, when you start missing, you gotta say, ’Maybe we should stop shooting 3s.’ That’s my criticism. Like damn dude, you ain’t making them.”
Putting the Spurs’ loss into context postgame, Barkley called San Antonio “the dumbest basketball team in the history of civilization,” ripping head coach Mitch Johnson and veteran guard De’Aaron Fox in particular for key mistakes.
But while Barkley has recently been inspired by the future of the NBA, the Hall of Famer for years constantly harped on how the game was getting worse, with Steph Curry and the Golden State Warriors the supposed culprits. With one of the strongest examples in NBA history of a team falling in love with 3s and losing, Barkley wasted no time taking his victory lap.
About Brendon Kleen
Brendon is a Media Commentary staff writer at Awful Announcing. He has also covered basketball and sports business at Front Office Sports, SB Nation, Uproxx and more.