What NBA star wouldn’t like partnering up with others similar to their caliber, in a bid to dominate their conference and win an NBA championship with ease? Charles Barkley would. But he’s a hypocrite, at least, according to Charles Oakley, who recently called the man out.
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Barkley, for the majority of his career, played with the Philadelphia 76ers and Phoenix Suns. The Suns were alright, and he made it to the NBA Finals with the squad before losing to Michael Jordan’s Bulls in six. But at the 76ers, Barkley got the true experience of being a star on a struggling team.
So, after over a decade of toiling in the peaks and valleys of NBA title contention, he opted for a move to the Houston Rockets, a team that had other future Hall of Famers on it. So, Oakley’s point is, why does Barkley criticize others today, for wanting to form superteams?
Barkley never hid the fact that he hated supporting superteams. He once stated, while talking about Kevin Durant, “I don’t know him that well, but I’m not a fan of superteams. So listen, if they win it, they win it, but to be perfectly clear, I’m rooting against those guys. I root against all superteams.”
Let’s take a look back at Barkley’s move to the Rockets in 1996 now. He joined to win a ring. The team had Hakeem Olajuwon, Clyde Drexler, and soon brought Scottie Pippen in. None of them young talents by any means. So Oakley wonders where the hatred for players like Durant choosing to join good teams comes from.
The former New York Knicks man spoke about players moving around in the league before singling Barkley out. He said, “You look at (Charles) Barkley, who said everybody team up. He teamed up with Hakeem and Scottie Pippen in Houston. And he always talking about somebody teaming up.”
“The guy’s just some hypocrite on TV, I mean, they’re commentating, they’re not educating people about the game…” Oakley added.
Barkley’s dissent towards superteams may just be bitterness. After all, the franchise he joined, although good on paper, never ended up winning the ring with them. Most of the players were old and past their prime, and after losing to John Stockton’s Utah Jazz in the ’97 Western Conference Finals, motivation derailed.
“I was on a superteam where we were all 97 years old,” Barkley hilariously stated in an interview with Chris Myers once. A clear admission from the Round Mound of Rebounds that the reason his Rockets stint didn’t quite work out was that they just weren’t young and athletic enough.
