Five home teams lost their playoff openers in the first round of the 2026 NBA postseason. The narrative coming out of the weekend was that the bracket was unusually wide open, that the underdogs had been mispriced, and that the playoffs were finally producing the chaos fans had been begging for. Charles Barkley, on Inside the NBA, offered a different theory. The chaos, he argued, is just the regular season finally telling the truth.
"I think this year in the NBA is a little bit different," Barkley said during the Inside the NBA broadcast on Tuesday night. "I think one reason you see real competitive games — not this one here, but in the NBA, like the Knicks against the Hawks, Minnesota against Denver, Portland against San Antonio — I think it's hard to tell. There's some teams in the playoffs that are better than you think they are, because there was so much tanking in the NBA. There's teams that got great records. They're a good team. They're not a great team, but they got a better record."
Barkley's example was the team that has been the East's nominal No. 1 seed for most of the year: the defending champion Boston Celtics, who lost Jayson Tatum to a long-term injury midseason and somehow continued to pile up wins.
"Like the Celtics got a really, really good team," Barkley said. "We don't know how good they are until obviously getting Jayson back, but their record probably was a little bloated, because you shouldn't be able to lose a guy as great as Jayson Tatum and still stay the same. That makes zero sense."
Kenny Smith, sitting next to him, pushed back almost immediately and reached for the obvious counter.
"Jaylen Brown just stepped up," Smith said.
Barkley would not accept it. He did not dispute Brown's level. He disputed the idea that any one player could erase Tatum's absence in the standings without something else inflating the win total.
"There's Jason, Jaylen, this kid in Oklahoma City and Jayson Tatum that they were not going to win the championship without Jayson Tatum," Barkley said. "They're not going to win a championship without Jayson Tatum is my point. But you can't — they didn't even have a slippage and they got rid of Porzingis and Drew Holiday, but they kept it the same. That's what I'm saying. There's a lot of teams in the NBA we can't even tell how good they are now because there was so much tanking."
The argument has practical implications. If Barkley is right, then the Hawks pushing the Knicks to a 2-1 lead, the Timberwolves taking Game 2 in Denver, and Portland giving San Antonio a real series are not random hot starts. They are the league's actual talent distribution showing up after a regular season in which roughly a third of the league had no incentive to win a single game in March.
The Atlanta Hawks, who beat the Knicks 109-108 in Game 3 on Wednesday night to take a 2-1 lead at Madison Square Garden, finished the regular season as the No. 6 seed. The Knicks were No. 3. Under Barkley's framing, the gap between those two teams in the regular season standings was always going to compress in a series where rotations shorten and tanking opponents disappear from the schedule.
The one-line stress test, of course, is the Oklahoma City Thunder, the team Barkley and the Inside the NBA crew were actually paid to talk about on Tuesday. The defending champions had just gone up 2-0 on Phoenix in the very game Barkley was discussing, and his only reservation about them was the left hamstring of Jalen Williams, who walked off in the third quarter and is now undergoing an MRI.
The defending champs, in other words, are the one team Barkley is sure of. Almost everyone else, in his read, is about to be tested for real for the first time in months.
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*Originally published on [NBA News](https://nbanews.global/article/charles-barkley-tanking-inflated-records-2026-nba-playoffs-upsets-celtics-tatum-2026). Visit for full coverage.*
