Michael Wilbon and Charles Barkley sat down for dinner one night in Arizona, decided they wanted to watch an NBA game, and then spent the next few minutes trying to figure out where the hell it was being aired.
“Charles and I both looked at each other and go, ‘Where’s the game? Where is it?'” Wilbon said during a recent appearance on The Dan Le Batard Show. “Two people who are employed to talk about basketball on national television don’t know where the damn game is.”
Wilbon has been covering the NBA since the 1980s, from his days at the Washington Post through more than two decades on Pardon the Interruption. Barkley has been one of the defining voices of NBA television since Inside the NBA became a studio institution, and now, after TNT lost its rights, he’s one of the faces of ESPN and ABC’s coverage alongside Shaquille O’Neal, Kenny Smith, and Ernie Johnson.
Between them, they represent more than half a century in the NBA. And they still couldn’t find a regular-season game without digging out their phones
It would be easy to chalk that up to age or technology — which is what Dan Le Batard did — but Wilbon refused to blame being 67 years old on his inability to find a game. In fact, the PTI co-host pointed out that his 17-year-old son, a high school basketball player, has the same problem.
The league’s new $76 billion media rights deal splits games across ESPN, ABC, NBC, Peacock, Prime Video, and NBA TV, with each platform receiving different games on different nights, depending on the week and whether there are conflicts with other programming. Figuring out where to watch the Mavericks play the Nuggets on any given Wednesday now requires consulting a schedule, checking multiple apps, and hoping you’re subscribed to whichever service carries the game that night.
Keeping track of that isn’t impossible. But it’s no longer intuitive, and that’s a meaningful difference.
The NBA anticipated this would be a problem back in October when it launched a “Tap to Watch” feature designed to funnel fans from wherever they’re consuming NBA content toward the platform streaming that night’s game with as few clicks as possible. Sara Zuckert, head of the NBA App, told Awful Announcing at the time that the feature was specifically designed to address confusion caused by adding NBC and Amazon as broadcast partners alongside ESPN’s existing package.
“We recognize there may be questions from fans this season with two new partners on board,” Zuckert said in October. “Tap to Watch is really designed to bring fans into the games wherever they are, and streaming opens up that ability for our fans who are already consuming NBA content on digital platforms.”
The league integrated Tap to Watch into partner platforms, including Google, Meta, X, Snap, and Reddit, with plans to expand to FanDuel, Fanatics, and Yahoo as the season progressed. The idea was that fans scrolling through highlights or reading about games on social media could click directly into a live stream if they were already subscribed to the service carrying that night’s matchup, or be prompted to subscribe if they weren’t.
The feature works as intended for fans who know to look for it and are willing to navigate through the NBA’s ecosystem of digital platforms to find games. But the feature either doesn’t work for Wilbon and Barkley, or they have no idea it exists.
“You don’t even know where the games are,” Wilbon added. “Is it on Prime? Is it on ESPN? Is it on NBC? NBA TV? Where the hell’s the game? I can’t find it.
The weekly breakdown looks something like this: Mondays on Peacock, Tuesdays on NBC and Peacock, Wednesdays on ESPN, Thursdays on Amazon after the NFL season ends, Fridays on either Amazon or ESPN depending on the week, Saturdays on ABC, Sundays on NBC and Peacock.
There was a version of this transition where the league prioritized making games easy to find alongside making them accessible to more people Instead, the league chose to maximize revenue from its broadcast partners and assume fans would figure out the rest on their own, which is how you end up with Michael Wilbon and Charles Barkley sitting at dinner in Arizona, unable to locate a game without asking Siri for help.