A year ago, ESPN’s NBA Countdown and TNT’s Inside the NBA shared the same airwaves for the first time ever for the NBA Cup festivities in Las Vegas. This year, there will once again be some crossover between the two, which is particularly interesting with the news that next year ESPN will license out Inside as their top studio show, with TNT still producing with the same crew (pending a new Shaq contract).
On Tuesday night, the TNT crew teased a challenge between one of Shaq, Chuck, or Kenny and Stephen A. Smith in a free throw shooting contest in Las Vegas before the Cup semifinals on Saturday. The problem is, the TNT fellas can’t agree on who will do it. Shaq and Chuck want Kenny — by far the best free throw shooter on the desk — to crush Stephen A., but Kenny insists he’s “too good” for it to even be fun going against Stephen A. Instead, he thinks he can coach Shaq up to beat Stephen A., which would certainly be more humiliating, but Shaq is, unsurprisingly, not keen on the idea of doing a free throw contest given that was his biggest weakness as a player — he also thinks Stephen A. is not big enough “in stature or in life” to be worth going against.
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We’ll have to wait until Saturday to find out which of the guys ends up doing it, with Smith chiming in on Twitter insisting he’d beat Chuck and that Shaq stands “no chance,” while giving The Jet just “a chance” against him. My guess is they get Stephen A. to jab at Kenny enough to get him to do it, but I do think it’d be very funny if Shaq did it and beat him.