Charles Barkley made the wild admission recently that by choosing to stay with TNT, he’s losing out on over $100 million and Carmelo Anthony has shared his thoughts about it.
“With Barkley it comes down to ‘This is home, I don’t want to leave this. We done built this. I built my whole life off this s**t.’ The money is enticing because they gotta throw the money out there and rightfully so, he deserves the numbers that’s out there but you can’t leave,” Anthony said on 7PM in Brooklyn. “That’s me speaking from a loyalty situation. That’s real shit what he did because I know the numbers that are being thrown at Barkley. I know the conversation that’s being had about Barkley. Those Stephen A. numbers are official. All those numbers are real…It’s loyalty.”
Barkley spoke about his decision to stay loyal to TNT recently and not join another network such as ESPN or Amazon, following the NBA’s decision to cut ties with TNT.
The 61-year-old explained that all he cared about was the staff he worked alongside for the past 24 years.
“The No. 1 thing for me is my people at Turner get to keep their jobs for at least another year, that’s all I was concerned with,” Barkley said on The Dan Le Batard Show.
The Hall of Famer added, “It was a great feeling and I want to thank all those networks for reaching out to me, it was really humbling and cool. … Like I said, Dan, even though they were throwing crazy numbers I was like, ‘Damn,’ but as long as I got my people safe at TNT, man, I feel really good. Like I say, they going to pay me to go talk about nothing so I can’t look a gift horse in the mouth. I probably would have had to do an honest day’s work if I went to one of those other networks.”