Charles Barkley Was Speechless When Ernie Johnson Told Him He Should Be Better At ‘Who He Play For?’

An annual tradition to start every NBA season is Charles Barkley going on Inside the NBA on TNT and illustrating how little he paid attention to the offseason player shuffle with a game of “Who He Play For?” On Tuesday night’s show, Barkley went 0-5 after missing on players like the Lakers’ Alfonzo McKinnie and the Bulls’ Garrett Temple, which was admittedly entertaining.

However later in the show, Ernie Johnson was plugging a new addition to the show’s social media strategy for the new season, which allows fans of Inside to play “Who He Play For?” on Instagram and compete with Chuck, when Barkley started feeling himself and boasted that he could surely beat “the public.”

Those are strong words from a man who had just literally gotten zero of the questions right minutes beforehand, but of course it’s Barkley, so he’s going to be cocky. The response from Johnson, though, was the punchline to the whole encounter:

Way to say what we’re all thinking, EJ! The game is fun and all, but at a certain point, you’ve gotta question how Barkley gets away with not knowing some of these guys. It’s not like Temple is a deep cut by any means, he was just playing in the Bubble and was a key figure in the players’ union during negotiations this year. Not that Barkley needs to know every Bulls eighth man, but most of these guys are in NBA rotations right now. They may very well be on TNT’s airwaves before long.

Johnson said what we were all thinking and Barkley, in a rare moment, was speechless.