In October 2012, the LA Lakers started the season 1-4 with a roster built around Kobe Bryant, Steve Nash, Dwight Howard, and Pau Gasol. Inside the NBA spent that week criticizing the offense head coach Mike Brown was running, and within days, Brown was gone. Whether that show was the one Kenny Smith referenced, nobody knows for certain. However, what is known is that whatever happened that night changed how he and Charles Barkley approached their platform forever.

“We had a day where I said one thing on the show, and Charles backed it up, and the coach got fired the next day,” Smith said, speaking on the MaXed Out podcast with Vernon Maxwell on Friday. “So me and Charles walked into the back, and we said, we can never do that again. We should never say the guy shouldn’t have his job. That was like 11 years ago. And since that day, we’ve never said anything like ‘this guy should be fired’ or ‘I don’t understand why.’ We didn’t realize the influence we had.”

For more context, Smith is referring to the moment he and Barkley realized their TV takes could spill into the real NBA world. At the start of the 2012-13 season, they openly questioned Mike Brown’s offense on Inside the NBA.

“The first thing is with our offense, every time down the floor — and if they want to, they can call Steve Nash and ask him — Steve Nash has the right to play pick and roll if he wants to,” Brown later defended himself publicly at the time, via the LA Times. “He has said it himself that he doesn’t feel like he’s as burdened because he doesn’t have to make every play for everybody all the time with what we’re trying to do. He can give it up and still have a chance to get it back. He’s said that he feels as fresh as he’s ever felt in his career because he doesn’t feel the pressure of making every single play.”

After the Lakers’ 1-4 start, he was fired, which is why Smith now says they drew a line and stopped calling for coaches to lose their jobs. Kenny Smith joined Inside the NBA full-time in 1998, with Barkley following in 2000, and by the early 2010s the show had spent over a decade gaining popularity, such that its opinions had consequences in front offices.

The idea that two analysts on a postgame show could contribute to the timing of a coaching decision isn’t as far-fetched as it might sound to an outside observer, especially in a league where narrative shapes perception quickly.

The Weight of the Platform, and Why the Lesson Still Matters

Inside the NBA won 19 Sports Emmy Awards during its run on TNT, and it has consistently ranked among the best sports analysis shows on American television since the early 2000s. That reach gave Smith’s comment real weight, because when two people with that kind of audience agree in real time that a coach should lose his job, the news moves quickly through social media, local coverage, and the conversations that follow inside organizations the next morning.

Smith and Charles Barkley have kept that standard even as the show moved to ESPN and settled into a reduced broadcast schedule that Barkley publicly criticized. They still tackle the same players, the same coaching decisions, and the same debates fans expect from them, but they have kept the line between sharp analysis and calling for someone’s dismissal in place since that night in the back of the set.