The NBA season is now roughly at its midway point for most teams. While viewership and overall attention are expected to pick up in February and beyond, following the NFL season, the transition from NBA on TNT to NBA on NBC has largely been seamless.
However, NBC may have raised fans’ expectations before the season when they announced that Michael Jordan — arguably the greatest basketball player of all time — would serve as a “special contributor” for the network. Jordan was set to do what many expected to be several sit-down interviews with Mike Tirico before select games, offering fans an inside look at his mindset and opinions on the current landscape of the game.
This season, though, Jordan has only sat down with Tirico once, and the network has primarily used clips and segments from that single, pre-taped interview. That decision has left many fans disappointed, especially considering NBC promoted the series heavily and even gave it a dedicated title: “MJ: Insights to Excellence.”
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Calling out NBC this week during a Sirius XM NBA Radio interview was fellow basketball legend and current ESPN analyst Charles Barkley, who criticized the network’s promotion of Jordan’s role as “disingenuous.”
“I was excited to have Michael because Michael Jordan is the reason we all make this money from the NBA,” Barkley said. “We need Michael Jordan affiliated with the NBA. But now you see this thing coming out with NBC and you’re like, ‘Wait, you all did one interview five months ago and you’re just gonna sprinkle it throughout the season?’ Come on, man. That’s disingenuous by NBC. That’s crazy. I’m so disappointed at the way that worked out.”
“It’s a bad look for NBC, plain and simple,” Barkley added. “They couldn’t fly to Michael once a month and do a new interview? That makes NBC look really bad, plain and simple.”
The details of how Jordan’s role would be utilized were not made public before the season, which is why the prospect of having an all-time legend like Jordan back in the fold—even in a limited capacity to discuss his career and the current state of the NBA—was so exciting for many fans, as he often stays completely out of the limelight.
Yet, it has been a major letdown, despite the network’s coverage of the games and its pregame and postgame analysis being strong through more than 40 games so far.
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