Few things on television have the potential to get more silly than the last, like, 10 minutes of Inside the NBA. By that point, everyone on set is just kind of done for the day because it’s nearly 1:30 in the morning, so the producers can schedule something pretty funny and get an extremely good segment out of it.
Thursday night’s national TV slate stunk — the Milwaukee Bucks beat the Boston Celtics so badly that TNT just put another game on (which was also, at the time, a blowout) and the Phoenix Suns rode a hot Bradley Beal shooting night to a blowout win over the Los Angeles Lakers — so the guys really could have used something fun to close out the evening. It turns out they got that, as they got to celebrate it being National Milk Day by learning how to milk a cow. As such, some hay got dropped on set, a cow got walked out there, and Charles Barkley and Ernie Johnson both sat down on a stool and got to work.
Here’s the really great thing about this segment, aside from Kenny Smith’s general hesitancy to milk a cow: The guys were clearly fascinated by the whole thing! They asked a ton of question in an effort to learn more and more about the process of milking a cow, because clearly, none of them had any idea what goes into it and they thought it was interesting. It was a funny and entertaining segment, but it also taught people about how milking cows works, and really, you can’t ask for anything more than that.