SPEEDWAY, Ind. — Losing the Brickyard 400 is tough to digest regardless. When you feel like circumstances beyond your control took away a victory in what is a NASCAR crown-jewel race, it’s even more difficult.

It’s understandable then that Ryan Blaney was mad following a third-place finish in Sunday’s race at Indianapolis Motor Speedway. The defending Cup Series champion’s problem, though, was that he was uncertain where his anger should be directed.

He suffered a tough beat on a track at which every driver wants to kiss the bricks in celebration. To win here is a significant accomplishment. And Blaney had come oh so close.

“I’m ticked off, but I don’t know who to be ticked off at. Like there’s no one to be ticked off at,” Blaney said. “It’s just racing luck.

“I’m just pissed off. Just sucks, man.”

The sequence that initiated Blaney’s frustration began when Kyle Busch spun and crashed underneath Denny Hamlin as they entered Turn 3, sending the race into overtime while also further pushing limits on fuel mileage that many were already up against.

Among those in danger of running out was leader Brad Keselowski, who opted for an improbable Hail Mary, hoping he could make it to the finish, so he opted not to pit for fuel during the caution period. Sure enough, just as Keselowski was coming to the start-finish line with the race about to resume, his fuel tank ran dry, prompting him to dart into the pits just as the field came off Turn 4.

This moved Blaney into the lead, with Kyle Larson sliding into second. But Blaney had already chosen the less favorable outside lane while Larson now was positioned on the inside. NASCAR prohibits drivers from getting a do-over on lane selection, thereby giving Larson the advantage because, had he been able to re-choose, Blaney would’ve picked the inside lane.

Instead, even though Blaney was the race leader, he felt like he was effectively a sitting duck.

“I can easily say, if the leader runs out coming to the restart, wave off the green, re-choose because you’re promoting the third-place guy now to where I get screwed,” Blaney said. “I’m the one getting screwed. So the third-place guy is benefitting, the guy behind me is benefitting.

“If it was any other place, it’s not going to be as bad because the second lane, you can kind of at all the other places, you can maintain. Here, it’s just a death sentence. You’re not maintaining the lead from the top on the front row.”

As Blaney anticipated, Larson capitalized and got the lead as they sped into Turn 1. It was a lead he wouldn’t relinquish. Larson later noted he specifically chose to restart directly behind Keselowski with the hope that he’d move up to the front should Keselowski run out of fuel.

“We had a lot of communication on our radio about (how) Brad was going to be really close on fuel, he may run out of fuel under these cautions,” Larson said. “I was going to choose behind him no matter what lane he took just in hopes that he would run out before we got to the restart zone.

“Yeah, he just ducked off onto pit road. I was like, ‘Wow, I can’t believe this is going exactly how we had kind of hoped and had thought about.’”

Some wondered post-race whether NASCAR should allow a re-choose in those situations. It’s not a question with a straightforward solution.

A notable hurdle on a 2.5-mile track like Indianapolis is the amount of time it might take to permit the field to reselect which lanes. The circumstances that arose Sunday are also not common enough to necessitate NASCAR reevaluating the rule.

“I understand it being highlighted because of it being this race, the situation, because it was front row,” said Cliff Daniels, Larson’s crew chief. “There’s been so many times in Cup races where we’ve seen that from fifth, 10th, 20th. (Today is no different.) Everybody knows that’s the rule.

“Every other racing series, you fill the row, you take the green flag and move on. I just don’t see it as that big of a concern.”

On Sunday, though, Blaney was impacted to some degree. That is indisputable. Even Larson acknowledged after the race that he benefited from Keselowski’s misfortune.

“With the way the strategy was working out, Brad running out of fuel, me inheriting the front row, a lot had to fall into place,” Larson said. “Thankfully it did.”

The victory was Larson’s first at Indianapolis, setting off a euphoric celebration that saw himself, Daniels, team owner Rick Hendrick and team executive Jeff Gordon go into the frontstretch grandstands to celebrate with fans. Larson now has won three of NASCAR’s crown-jewel races.

Meanwhile, down pit road, things were decidedly less festive. After getting out of his car, Blaney needed a moment to decompress, opting to go sit on the pit wall to gather himself.

“We should’ve won the race,” he said. “… Just disappointed. That just stinks. That’s just dumb luck. We did everything right to win and he got a break, pretty good.”

(Top photo of Kyle Larson and Ryan Blaney during Sunday’s Brickyard 400: Justin Casterline / Getty Images)

It was in the autumn of 2017 when goal kicks first started to become viewed as a legitimate attacking instrument.

After signing from Benfica, it soon became clear that the left leg of Manchester City goalkeeper Ederson was more of a trebuchet than a human limb, capable of striking the ball 80 yards over the top of the opposition defence to set up goals.

The ploy befuddled teams, as it was something that had not been seen before. City’s entire front three would position themselves 20 yards beyond the opposition back line, safe in the knowledge they could not be offside from a goal kick.

This set-up from a City goal kick is great. Players stretched out all over the place, the opposition have no idea whether the pass is going to go short, into the big hole in the middle, or straight up top. Ederson really has changed the game. pic.twitter.com/hhzQBJuJP1

— Sam Lee (@SamLee) April 28, 2019

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There are an average of 16 goal kicks in a Premier League match, which makes the scenario the third-most-common set piece behind throw-ins and free kicks.

Until 2017, however, presumably because geographically in terms of the pitch they start just about as far from the opposition net as possible, goal kicks had largely been performed off the cuff and without much thought, seen as nothing more than a requirement to restart play rather than a set piece that could be mapped out and used against your opponent.

On most occasions, teams pushed everyone up and the goalkeeper smashed the ball as far as he could, an act in English football widely soundtracked by fans behind his goal shouting, “Oooooooooooh…! You’re s**t! Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh!” — originally as an attempt to distract the goalkeeper involved, later as a form of pantomime to amuse themselves.

For decade after decade, goal kicks were invariably hit long and with little strategic thought (Evening Standard/Hulton Archive/Getty)

Then, in summer 2019, IFAB — the body responsible for the laws of the game — changed the one around goal kicks to state that the ball no longer had to exit the penalty area of the team taking it before a player could receive the first pass.

Football has fiddled with the offside rule and VAR has transformed the spectacle, particularly for those attending games, but the change to the goal-kick rule is the most radical change to the style of the sport since the one banning goalkeepers from picking up backpasses was introduced in the early 1990s.

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There were some immediate, albeit expected, changes in behaviour now that the first pass was free to be controlled anywhere inside the penalty area. The number of goal kicks in the Premier League played short has steadily risen and is now more than double the figure in 2018-19, when around three-quarters of them were walloped upfield.

An additional area measuring 44 yards by 18 yards in which to receive the ball may not seem transformative, but in the past five years it has played a significant role in hastening the rise of man-to-man marking, the hollowing out of central midfield and the tactic of playing over the opposition press.

These are three of the themes that UEFA’s technical observer tactical review highlighted from this summer’s European Championship, epitomised by Slovakia luring England into a full press and almost scoring via direct play up to their striker, and the Netherlands creating an overload in the middle of the pitch against high-pressing Austria.

Slovakia almost score from a goal kick against England

The Dutch create a four-v-two in midfield and counter-attack on Austria

It is why the scenarios below — one cluster of players around the penalty area of the team taking the goal kick, another just inside the opposition half and a sea of nothingness in between — have become a common sight across all top leagues.

Tactical camera view of Brighton vs Chelsea

Tactical camera view of Fulham vs Brighton

Man City vs Luton in the FA Cup last season, in which Ederson’s long kicking ability played a pivotal part in several goals

‘The impact of the rule change was underestimated by many,” said Arsene Wenger, the former Arsenal manager who is now chief of global development for FIFA, world football’s governing body, in a review of the rule last year.

“It was introduced to make the game faster and more spectacular, but even more has changed. The main attraction is to attract your opponent as far away from goal as you can, and try to play through. If you can play through the first pressure, you have a whole half of the pitch to be dangerous. That is what is at stake from the start.”

But how does a trend like this start to proliferate in such a quick space of time? And how has it become just as normal to see a centre-back passing the ball to their goalkeeper as the other way around?

It is something Arsenal regularly do, with defender Gabriel playing to ’keeper David Raya before the latter punts long towards Kai Havertz up front and the midfield cavalry race forward on supporting runs.

“What initially happened after the rule change was that it made it easier to build up, as you weren’t having to play this long pass across the box, which gave the pressing team the chance to get there early,” says one first-team coach/analyst at a major European club, quoted anonymously here as they did not have permission to speak.

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“Back then, if the goalkeeper played it to a centre-back, you had locked yourself down to one side of the pitch, whereas now if the defender plays to the goalkeeper, you are dead-centre.

“Most teams bring midfielders to the box now and it just makes the space much bigger to defend. It is so hard to be compact as, if you want to get pressure on at the top end, the midfielders are having to match midfielders, which naturally opens up space behind them.

“The question you are asking the opposition is, ‘Are you so keen to get pressure on us that you are going to leave yourself three-v-three or four-v-four at the back?’ Teams realised they had to commit more bodies to force it long, which explains the rise of man-to-man pressing.”

(Alex Pantling/Getty Images)

Every action brings a reaction, however, and that is what has happened, with teams realising they can manufacture false transition moments by isolating their forwards.

“The attacking team’s response has been, ‘If you are going to release six or seven players into the final quarter of the pitch, we’ll get a goalkeeper who can put it over the top of your defence’,” the same coach/analyst says. “There is no space between the lines now to be static and turn on the ball. The concept has changed to become about leaving the big spaces you want to be free and then arriving there at the right moment, so you can run and your marker has to react to it.”

One of the most effective teams in the first few seasons after the rule change were Italy’s Inter Milan, under Antonio Conte. As a coach whose preferred brand of football is about rehearsed patterns of play, Conte took advantage by manipulating the opposition’s setup to leave his attackers with space to run into.

More recently, Germany’s national team have been creative in their use of goal kicks, and in their March friendlies this year they showed us how many different layers are involved in the thinking.

In this example against the Netherlands, goalkeeper Manuel Neuer edges forward with the ball while his midfielders move out from the centre to drag their markers wide and open up a central passing channel to Havertz. The ball from Neuer is the trigger for the supporting cast to coalesce around him, with Havertz’s lay-off springing a four-v-four opportunity.

The new rule gave coaches a blank canvas to go to work on, and has produced many variations in how to try to gain an advantage in build-up.

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Southampton manager Russell Martin has been one of the head coaches who has sought to rethink the setup.

One centre-back drops in line with the goalkeeper, receives, and then waits on the opposition striker pressing him before playing a return ball to the ’keeper, who had pushed up 10 yards so he could be used as the spare man, just like another centre-back.

Leading French club Marseille’s new head coach Roberto De Zerbi was bold in subscribing to almost exclusively short goal kicks in his previous job at Brighton & Hove Albion of the Premier League but he was even more experimental in the two clubs before that at Sassuolo in Italy and Ukraine’s Shakhtar Donetsk.

In his 2020-21 debut season with the latter, he regularly had his team play out with four players inside their penalty box, drawing the press in before finding the spare man after they had lured the opposition players to one side.

Last season, Hamburg-based St Pauli, whose manager Fabian Hurzeler has succeeded De Zerbi at Brighton, attempted various high-stakes routines on their way to promotion from the German second division, but the one common theme was their motivation to have their goalkeeper advance with the ball after receiving from a defender.

This meant his long kicks went even nearer to the opposition goal, with the team higher up the pitch when contesting any resulting second balls.

All of these teams vary their approach, as does new Liverpool head coach Arne Slot.

When his Feyenoord team played short with the intention of cutting through the press, however, they did it in a much bolder way than most.

Here, against NEC Nijmegen in the Dutch top flight earlier this year, Feyenoord have goalkeeper Justin Bijlow stand still with the ball and delay his pass until the very last moment, and centre-back Thomas Beelen is trusted to dribble across his own penalty area and wait for a space to present itself.

This is a more freehand approach, but there are clear risks that come with playing like this inside your own penalty area — as many teams have found out in the past five years. Which explains why setting the bait with a pass to the goalkeeper and then going long has become the go-to strategy for most top teams.

Football underwent a significant change five years ago and we are only starting to understand how much tactical variety has been made possible.

(Top photo: Jacques Feeney/Offside/Offside via Getty Images)

The first day I went down to Atlanta in 2005, to TNT’s Techwood Drive studios to do “Inside the NBA,” the show’s producer, the legendary Tim Kiely, made things simple for me.

“If you look at the (bleeping) camera, I’ll wring your neck,” he said.

I smiled. This was going to work out.

Kiely and I were former employees at ESPN. So I knew exactly what he meant.

TK, as everyone knows him, had gone to what was then called Turner Sports years before I did, and was the driving force behind “Inside” becoming the greatest sports studio show in the history of television, a Sports Emmy-winning Leviathan.

At ESPN, the network was the star. You could be on the network for a while, and if you were deemed essential for a while (it was, with few exceptions, not for all that long), you could be on the network a lot. But no one anchor or reporter was indispensable. The iconic SportsCenter set? That was indispensable.

So, when you were on an ESPN show, it was important for you, representing the show when you were on it, to connect with the people watching at home, not the people sitting next to you in the studio. You were told, early and often, when you wanted to make a point, to literally turn your body away from the person sitting next to you, who may have asked you a question, and to look into whatever camera to which you were assigned. Then, you could disseminate your information, or make your point, to the people watching.

By contrast, in Techwood’s Studio J, from where TNT’s “Inside” was broadcast, Charles Barkley and Kenny Smith and, later, Shaquille O’Neal were the stars, along with the best studio host of all time, Ernie Johnson. But, and this is why the show worked, they weren’t cast in bronze. If you were on the set with them, you were, as far as everyone on set was concerned, their equal. If you thought they were wrong about something, you were allowed – you were expected – to challenge them. Just because they were former players, and great ones, didn’t mean your opinion didn’t count. But, it had to be genuine, not forced, canned “debate.”

TK would say, over and over, “Charles is right there. Talk to him! Kenny’s right there! Talk to him! You disagree with Chuck? Say so!”

During Kiely’s 28 years of producing the show, “Inside” took the top place in the NBA firmament. It has remained there since he retired last year. There was, and is, no game crew or league-ancillary programming on any other network that was, or is, as good as what came out of that studio every Thursday night during the season. And that extended to the “40 games in 40 nights,” as TNT called it, of the playoffs. Nothing, including the finals, or draft coverage, was as good. “Inside” was the gold standard.

I was on a bunch of NBA studio shows when I was at the Four-Letter, including “NBA Today” and “NBA 2 Nite.” I loved them all. We did good work, occasionally excellent work, in the years I was there, with Mark Jones, Jason Jackson and Stuart Scott. It was an honor and an education to work on those shows with coaches such as the late Jack Ramsay, and Fred Carter. I learned so much from them.

But we all knew “Inside” was better.

That’s why TK’s words made me smile. At Turner, I didn’t have to play the role of the “information guy,” even though that was my job. I could just be me. And that was what I did when I made appearances on the show over my 14 years at Turner.

And thus, the lamentations about the future of “Inside” after next season, when the NBA’s new media rights deal begins, are heartfelt and genuine. The NBA’s Board of Governors, on Tuesday, approved the new deal, which begins with the 2025-26 NBA season. It introduces Amazon Prime Video as a media rights streaming partner and reintroduces NBC, which had the NBA package from 1990 to 2002, for both broadcast and streaming rights (via its Peacock streaming service).

As part of the new deal, which will run for 11 years, starting with the 2025-26 season, and pay out $76 billion to the league’s 30 teams, NBC would broadcast games nationally on Tuesdays, while Peacock would have games on Mondays. Both NBC and Amazon would put NBA games into their current slots for NFL broadcasts, on Sunday nights (NBC) and Thursdays (Amazon), after the NFL season concludes.

ABC/ESPN would continue to broadcast the NBA finals, while airing slightly fewer regular season games, and have a conference final every year. Amazon and NBC would alternate years carrying the other conference final.

And Turner, now Warner Bros. Discovery, would be the odd network out.

But, WBD will have a five-day window to match the terms of the new package and hold onto its Thursday night package of games, as well as an annual conference final – and, of course, “Inside” – once the league formally delivers the package to WBD’s corporate offices. NBA Commissioner Adam Silver said at a news conference following the Board of Governors meeting in Las Vegas Tuesday that the media deals were not yet done, and wouldn’t confirm if or when the five-day window for WBD has opened.

So, the waiting will continue for WBD/Turner employees, who’ve been in limbo for months as the parent company negotiated with the league, yet have continued to produce the kind of memorable programming for which Turner and “Inside” have been known for three decades. Silver felt compelled to apologize to WBD/Turner employees for leaving their futures twisting in the wind in his news conference at the start of the finals last month.

It’s something no one wants to truly contemplate. There’s never been anything like “Inside the NBA” in sports media, and there’s not going to be anything like it if it’s gone after next year.

It was, as a friend put it a while back, the TV manifestation of where people who love the NBA assemble every week, a communal hangout. A place where you’d feel comfortable getting a beer, or another substance, maybe, with your friends, and loud talk about your favorite teams and players, or the teams and players that you hated, while inhaling a sandwich and watching the game together, either in person or via group chat.

It was a place where you felt … safe.

You felt like you knew Chuck and Shaq and Ernie and Kenny because their actual personalities, who they really were off-camera, came through so clearly on camera. The show had some scripted elements to it, and Ernie did the best he could to keep the show on topic, but for the most part, every week, they went out there and … winged it. Barkley, Smith and Shaq never went to the production meetings before airtime. It was just four guys who actually enjoyed being in each other’s company, riffing off one another. But that requires tremendous trust. The television business does not often engender trust among people who are competing for air time and money and keeping their jobs.

It all started with Charles.

Shaquille O’Neal, Ernie Johnson, Kenny Smith and Charles Barkley became must-see tv on “Inside the NBA.” (Brandon Todd/NBAE via Getty Images)

It’s funny. People under a certain age — say, 40 or so — don’t seem to realize this now. But Barkley was as big a superstar in his NBA days as anyone not named Michael Jordan.

Barkley was on both the NBA’s all-time Top 50 and Top 75 teams. He was the 1992-93 NBA MVP. He was an 11-time All-Star. He averaged 23 points, 12.9 rebounds and 3.9 assists in 123 career postseason games, including a 56-point gem against the Warriors in a first-round game in 1994. He was the best player on the Dream Team, in 1992 — a team that included Jordan, Magic and Bird.

Now, to be sure, Magic and Bird were on the back nine of their careers by the time they went to Barcelona for the Olympics, and Jordan was picking his spots after a grueling year leading the Bulls to a successful defense of their championship. But Chuck was nonetheless dominant, a blur in transition, a beast in the paint. And he was, as ever, the go-to guy for anyone with a notepad or camera. (Charles once spent half an hour explaining to reporters in Philly why he wasn’t talking to the local media.)

“I don’t know much about Angola,” he said of the U.S. team’s opening-round Olympic opponent in Barcelona, “but I know they’re in trouble.”

He had as many commercials back in the day as Shaq has now. He hosted “Saturday Night Live” (and beat up Barney the Dinosaur in the process). He got arrested in a Milwaukee bar after punching a weightlifter; he got arrested in Orlando after an incident in a club where he wound up throwing a belligerent patron into a mirror, which crashed through a plate glass window. (Chuck actually didn’t know how many times he’d been arrested over the years. When he got to Turner, TNT, smartly, assigned him a couple of bodyguards.)

He was, then as now, completely fearless, saying whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted. In Philly, he’d verbally immolate his boss, 76ers owner Harold Katz, and do the same to his coaches and teammates, or anyone else who got in his craw.

“I love when they say Magic makes James Worthy better, and Kareem (Abdul-Jabbar) better,” he’d say at his locker. “I have to make Sheldon Jones better.”

So, when Barkley came to “Inside” after his retirement as a player, he could have put up all kinds of caveats and I-won’t-do-thats, befitting a player of his stature. But he didn’t. In fact, he did the exact opposite. He would do anything, including things that made him look ridiculous.

Barkley battled weight problems throughout his playing career and well into his retirement. An overly sensitive superstar could have insisted that fat jokes were off limits on the set. Instead, Barkley leaned into the constant digs at his girth. Weighing 30-plus pounds more than his supposed 290 pounds early in December 2001, Barkley vowed to be under 300 by the end of January 2002. He made it a thing around which “Inside” could build programming! And he followed through on his promise to get weighed “in my drawers” on the show.

During Yao Ming’s rookie season, in 2002-03, Kenny insisted that Yao, the celebrated big man from China, would score at least 19 points in a game during his rookie campaign. Chuck said if that happened, he’d “kiss Kenny’s ass” on national TV. Ten days later, Yao went 9 of 9 from the floor and scored 20 against the Lakers. Two days after that, with then-Minnesota Governor Jesse “the Body” Ventura on set, Kenny brought a donkey onto the set. If Chuck kissed the donkey’s ass, Kenny said, the bet would be satisfied.

Chuck puckered up.

I am fairly certain that Jordan would not have done this.

The one time I saw Barkley actually distraught was the night his Suns lost Game 6 of the 1993 Finals, at home, to the Bulls. He drove up to the Houston’s restaurant in downtown Phoenix, alone, after John Paxson’s dagger 3 beat Phoenix in the last seconds. He joined a bunch of sportswriters eating outside. He was down. He really thought the Suns were better than Chicago that season. But he couldn’t get them over the top.

And yet, years later, Chuck let “Inside” clown him for a segment where a set was transformed into “The Champions’ Club,” which you could only enter if you’d won an NBA title. Magic, on set with the crew that week, obviously got in easily with his five championships with the Lakers. So did Kenny, who’d won back-to-back titles with Houston in 1994 and ’95. Ernie got in on Magic’s invite. But after Kenny walked in, with Barkley right behind him, Chuck got stopped at the door by the “bouncer.” Ernie soon stuck his head out of the “club” door, noting all the guys with rings that were supposedly in the club: Fennis Dembo, Mike Penberthy, the late Earl Cureton.

“Oh, y’all are playing a joke on the Chuckster,” Barkley said.

That same ethos applied to Kenny. When Kobe Bryant came out with a new Nike shoe, the Hyperdunk, in 2008, he did a viral ad for Nike with then-teammate Ronny Turiaf  in which he, allegedly, jumped over an incoming Aston Martin, so great were the Hyperdunk’s qualities.

Naturally, when the Lakers were on TNT, and Kobe had a great game, “Inside” had Bryant on afterward. Kenny said that he, too, had a new Nike shoe coming out — the “Hyperdunk Smiths” — that would soon be in stores. And he, too, could jump over a car!

It didn’t go quite as well as Kobe’s leap.

Shaq also got got, after he joined the show.

“Inside” quickly built a “storyline” where the 7-1, who-knows-how-much-he-weighs self-described “MDE: Most Dominant Ever” center bullied poor Ernie, literally shaking him down for lunch money. But, ultimately, Ernie got his revenge. And, infamously, a moment of extreme clumsiness by the Big Fella in 2017 was replayed, a few thousand times, on “Inside” over the next few years.

Shaq made fun of my headshot. I made fun of his movies. Joe Underhill, a diminutive researcher and field producer who worked his butt off for years, was reborn and became semi-famous as “Underdog,” who’d feed Ernie and others statistical information, appear in skits and be prepared, as O’Neal would say seemingly every week, to put some pithy saying on a T-shirt. And, the portal went both ways: in the last few years, fans have been encouraged to clap back at the crazy things Shaq, Kenny and Chuck said and did, whenever possible.

“Inside” was not for the Sloan crowd. There was no genuflecting at the altar of True Shooting Percentage or PER or Defensive Box Plus-Minus. If endless video breakdowns of the three best ways to ice a pick-and-roll was your thing, this was not your show. And the Insiders reveled in their ignorance; they were definitely eye- and smell-testers, not Second Spectrum guys.

General managers and executives around the league would occasionally rail to me about how little educating about the game Chuck, Kenny and Shaq did with their large platform. (Interestingly, coaches rarely complained.) I would acknowledge the point, but also point to “Inside’s” growing collection of Emmys. Their approach seemed to resonate with an awful lot of viewers, and voters.

Spurs coach Gregg Popovich was one of many to share a dose of wisdom with David Aldridge during his TNT days. (Soobum Im / USA Today)

Nor did “Inside” make the games the network paid billions to air every week sacred, as other networks did. If TNT had a dog of a doubleheader on in January, the “Inside” guys would say it was a dog. Chuck would talk about shows on other networks that he was watching in the green room while TNT aired its crappy-for-that-night NBA fare. A staple at the start of every season was “Who He Play For?,” a faux game show segment that served only to display Barkley’s thimble-like knowledge of non-superstars around the league.

But — and this was rarely acknowledged by the show’s critics — nothing excited the studio more than a well-played, riveting game. Chuck, in particular, would fall in love with the last good team he saw on the air, pledging that they were the best (or second-best, or third-best) team in their conference. He made Manu Ginobili into a household name with his weekly “GINOBILI!!” fanboying. On the other hand, Chuck’s many wrong “gar-run-teeed!” game/series predictions became their own cottage industry.

When “Inside” did focus on the games and players, though, its analysts’ praise was as welcomed as their scorn was withering. It made clear the lie of so many of the current players who dismissed the “Inside” guys as fossils, incapable of playing or understanding today’s game. If they were so out of touch, why did the players care so much what they said about them?

O’Neal’s “Shaqtin’ a Fool” segments became must-watch TV, as he (more accurately, the show’s producers) lampooned the biggest blunders players made in games every week. Shaq crushed JaVale McGee to the point where it became kind of cringeworthy. It wasn’t that McGee wasn’t messing up, occasionally in spectacular fashion, but a) he wasn’t doing it every second of every game, as Shaqtin’ made it seem, and b) Shaq was rubbing his nose in it every week.

When McGee had a good game in 2013 while with the Nuggets and was invited on “Inside” afterward, he told Shaq to his face that he didn’t watch what he called “Shaqtin’ a Coon.” O’Neal’s and McGee’s mothers actually had to step in and squash the beef between their sons.

And there was so much beef over the years. Chuck vs. Durant. Shaq versus Chuck. Shaq versus Kenny. Chuck versus Draymond Green. Shaq versus Shannon Sharpe. Shaq and Chuck versus Kendrick Perkins. Chuck, infamously, versus the women of San Antonio. A postgame skirmish between the Clippers and Rockets, with Houston players supposedly trying to break into the Clippers’ locker room, became part of “Inside” lore when reporter Ros Gold Onwude noted a “police presence” outside the Rockets’ team bus, and Shaq and Chuck eviscerated the softness of whoever thought cops were needed to settle things that the players should have handled themselves.

But it was because everyone watching had seen Barkley’s struggles with weight over the years that his digs at the Pelicans’ Zion Williamson hit so hard. It was because Barkley was fearless with his words (critics might say careless) that he could so effectively lampoon the account of actor Jussie Smollett that he’d been mugged late at night in Chicago by two men, one of whom allegedly yelled racial slurs at Smollett. And it was because “Inside” was so well-respected by so many that it’s “Gone Fishin’” segments, sending every team off into the summer after it was eliminated in the playoffs, were so eagerly anticipated.

Yet, on a dime, “Inside” could, and did, get serious.

In the midst of COVID-19 in 2020, the crew assembled remotely after George Floyd’s memorial in Minneapolis. “This plague of racism, which comes at the same time as the pandemic, demands our attention,” Ernie said.

They talked about Jan. 6. They used the start of their pregame show before Game 4 of the Western Conference final in 2022 to discuss the mass shooting earlier that day in Uvalde, Texas, that resulted in the death of 19 children and two teachers. When players in the Orlando bubble refused to play scheduled playoff games in 2020 to protest the shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wis., and to protest police violence around the country, Kenny followed suit, walking off the set in solidarity with the players. Ernie talked openly in 2006 about his cancer diagnosis; his partners spoke in his absence, eloquently and emotionally, after Ernie’s son, Michael, died at 33, in 2021.

And they were there for Shaq after Kobe died. They understood. We understood. Shaq and Kobe had mad beef when they were together with the Lakers. But you can fight your brother, call him all kinds of names, in the moment. He’s still your brother. He’s still family.

None of this felt forced. No one brought scorching hot takes to these topics. They talked through things, as friends do with one another at hard moments. They stumbled over their words. They talked over one another. Often, they disagreed. Unique among such shows, the “Inside” crew had the cachet to pivot from the ridiculous to the solemn, and back, in a matter of minutes. All due respect, but you didn’t see that — or, at least, you didn’t remember seeing that — on the Sunday NFL shows, or the Saturday college football shows.

“Inside the NBA” always stood on its own. Just as multiple generations have grown up watching The Simpsons,” the “Today Show” or “Sesame Street,” “Inside” has just been so indefatigably there for so long, and has so rarely failed to entertain or at least make you react, that it’s hard to imagine turning on a television going forward without being able to see what the fellas are up to this week.

(Photo illustration: Dan Goldfarb / The Athletic. Photo: Issac Baldizon / NBAE Getty Images)