Charles Barkley Calls Cavaliers ‘Dummies’ For ‘Choke Job’ Against Knicks

The Cleveland Cavaliers played so poorly that they evoked vitriol Charles Barkley usually reserves for the Los Angeles Lakers.

The Cavaliers held a 22-point lead over the New York Knicks with just under eight minutes to go in the fourth quarter of Game 1 in the Eastern Conference Finals. The Knicks hadn’t played since sweeping the Philadelphia 76ers nine days prior, so it was easy to chalk it up to a little bit of rust. The Cavaliers banked on that.

Instead, the Knicks just needed three quarters to get warmed up. All-Star guard Jalen Brunson hunted James Harden on defense and scored whenever he wanted — including 13 points of the Knicks’ 18-1 run — to lead the Knicks all the way back. He tied the game at 101 with 19.3 seconds left, forcing overtime.

New York manhandled Cleveland in overtime to win 115-104, the largest playoff comeback in Knicks franchise history before a rapturous crowd at Madison Square Garden. It was poetry, but Barkley was his own kind of poet on ESPN’s “Inside the NBA” postgame.

“You get something stuck in your throat, you get choky,” Barkley said of the Cavaliers. “Hell yeah, that was a choke job.”

Barkley added, “C’mon, man, they started taking the air out of the ball with six minutes to go like dummies.”

Barkley specifically lamented how well the Cavaliers moved the ball in the first three quarters before switching to one-on-one ball during their fourth-quarter collapse. He also called Brunson “clutch,” which is fitting for the 2024-25 NBA Clutch Player of the Year.

After they interviewed Brunson, Barkley doubled down: “You know, Ernie [Johnson], I take my job very seriously, and I don’t like to get on TV and say people choked. But that was a damn choke job.”

The Cavaliers have less than 24 hours to digest it before regrouping to play the Knicks back at the Garden on Thursday night.

Watch the full “Inside the NBA” segment below.