ATLANTA – Shaquille O’Neal is sitting on a couch outside the green room at Turner Studios watching the Portland Trail Blazers play the Houston Rockets. It’s the nightcap of TNT’s weekly Thursday NBA doubleheader and features a player who’s long been one of O’Neal’s favorite topics, Rockets All-Star center Dwight Howard. Midway through the first quarter, Howard is wide open near the basket as James Harden passes the ball to Patrick Beverley, who misses a jumper.

“Hey,” Shaq calls out to a nearby staffer. “Go tell the guy over there with the two computers that I want that play. Dwight was standing in the middle of the lane and the guy didn’t throw it to him. I need that clip.”

O’Neal’s request is relayed to the control room, where the video is pulled and doctored with a cutting-edge telestrator called Hego to emphasize Howard’s position on the play. Over the course of the first half, O’Neal requests video of a few more plays involving Howard, which he wants to use as a jumping-off point for a discussion on the halftime show.

He’d get up and make the request himself, but he blew out his hamstring during that morning’s heavily-hyped Chariots of Backfire race with his Inside the NBA colleagues, so he’s receiving electrical stimulation treatment on his leg while watching the game. When halftime hits, Shaq’s Howard talking points lead the conversation, accompanied by the video he requested. Besides O’Neal, TNT’s Inside the NBA panel includes former players Charles Barkley and Kenny Smith alongside studio host and de facto straight man Ernie Johnson. When USA TODAY Sports visited the set earlier this month, occasional panelist Chris Webber was part of the crew, too.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAwf2irTFUE

In the basement of Turner’s Atlanta headquarters, the NBA TV and Inside the NBA studios sit side-by-side. Both are massive, decorated with all 30 teams’ logos and featuring league-regulation hardwood floors, hoops and free-throw and three-point lines.

“The initial thought process behind the set is to build it unlike anybody else’s.” Turner Sports creative director Craig Barry said. “It’s a 360-degree set. The color palette is different because the signature graphics of the show are different.”

In both studios, the hardwood floors and three-point lines are fully authentic.

“The talent put their fists down and said, if you’re going to put a three-point line and a free-throw line in the studio, it has to be regulation,” Barry said.

This week, a group of elementary school-age children (family friends of Johnson) are treated to a live taping of Inside. They sit behind the cameras and joke around with the panelists during commercial breaks. Barkley signs autographs and ducks a one-on-one challenge from one of the boys (“Come on, now. Why would I want to hurt your self-esteem?”), and dispenses some valuable life advice.

“Don’t be in a hurry to grow up,” he tells them. “When you’re a kid, you have it great. Grown-ups have to go to work every day.” He adds one more thought, for good measure: “And make sure you do good in school.”

The colorful set is just part of the machinery Inside the NBA. In the control room, producers in charge of on-screen graphics, cuts and camera angles shout commands to each other constantly. In another room, rows of video loggers sit at iMacs taking down every detail of every play, in case highlight clips need to be pulled.

This operation isn’t just for the TNT show — in addition to broadcasting games on TNT, Turner Sports controls NBA TV (the league’s 24-hour cable network) and NBA Digital, which includes the league’s official website and team sites, the League Pass subscription package, and mobile and tablet apps on various platforms. While Turner’s NBA operation is massive, the NBA on TNT telecasts and Inside the NBA have proven a sweet spot. NBA on TNT has averaged the highest viewership among cable NBA telecasts for 11 consecutive seasons, and according to Nielsen, Inside regularly draws higher ratings among key male demographics than The Tonight Show With Jay Leno and Late Night With Jimmy Fallon during the playoffs.

“Our approach is ‘serve your fans,’” says Christina Miller, Turner Sports’ senior vice president of programming. “You have to follow your fans and give your fans what they want. Then they spend time with you and give you time in the future.”

There is no question that Inside the NBA has struck a chord with fans, thanks to its blending of unscripted dialogue, sharp analysis, and a panel that has no qualms with stirring the pot.

“The good thing about the leadership at TNT is that they don’t micromanage,” says O’Neal. “They encourage us to be ourselves.”

Inside the NBA’s talent has plenty of fun and everyone is careful to not tamper with the chemistry. None of the panelists outside of Johnson attend production meetings, a decision everyone acknowledges is vital to the organic dialogue of the show.

“We don’t want them at the production meetings,” Johnson says. “We don’t want them there because as long as the producer and I know what we’ve got, that’s all we need.”

“Philosophically, the best TV comes from great chemistry,” says Barry. “It doesn’t happen for every show. Sometimes you have to search for it, and even then you don’t always find it. But when you do find it, you can’t deny it. For these guys specifically, they feel like guys that you would want to sit down and have a conversation with, and feel like you can. They’re approachable.”

“Our concept is, if we’re going to keep you up this late, we might as well entertain you,” says O’Neal. “We can talk about basketball, but nobody’s going to stay up and see us just talk about who’s going to win or lose.”

It doesn’t hurt, though, that the panelists have a combined six NBA championships, 31 All-Star selections and two NBA Most Valuable Player awards.

“Between the guys in the room, there’s nothing in basketball that’s going to happen that none of us have ever seen, heard, done or accomplished,” says Smith. “Winning, almost winning, can’t win — there’s nothing that’s going to happen that we won’t be equipped to talk about. We’re talking about dunks? OK, Shaq tore down a backboard. We’re talking about great-passing big men? We’ve got C-Webb. We’re talking about posting up? We’ve got Shaq. We’re talking about three-point shooting? I did that.”

And then there’s Barkley, the show’s lightning rod. The Hall of Famer and former league MVP is famous (and infamous) for speaking his mind, no matter the subject or the consequences.

“When Charles got here, he changed our show dramatically,” Johnson says. “Kenny and I were having a good time and it was a little off the wall, but he changed the show dramatically and he changed the landscape for every show.”

“Everybody felt like, ‘We have to bring someone in to be our Charles Barkley.’ But it doesn’t work that way. Charles had that equity built in, of all those years as a player being the most quotable guy in the league. He almost had that diplomatic immunity. He’ll say something outrageous and people will just say, ‘Oh, that’s Chuck being Chuck.’ Other guys try to say it, and suddenly find themselves looking for other work.”

“I want the fans to enjoy the game,” Barkley says. “I want them to laugh and have a good time. The hardcore basketball fans are going to watch no matter what. But we want other people to watch our show. We want to get the people who are not basketball fans watching, at least I do. If you want to talk basketball, we can do that. If you want to have fun, we can do that too.”

Barkley is in a good mood this week. His beloved Auburn Tigers won the SEC football championship game. He and Johnson had a bet on the game, and as a result, Johnson has to wear an Auburn bowtie on the air during this week’s edition of Inside.

“Hey, Smitty!” Barkley shouts across the green room to NBA TV analyst and Michigan State alum Steve Smith. “Which way is Pasadena?”

He continues this way throughout the evening, needling other staffers about their college football teams and gloating about Auburn, with a few observations about the night’s NBA games thrown in.

The focus of Barkley’s wrath this week is the Clippers, who are getting blown out by the struggling Brooklyn Nets in the first game of TNT’s doubleheader. He sits in a chair at the front of the green room, staring at a wall of monitors showing different camera angles and feeds, taking notes.

“This team has the toughness of a flea,” he says out loud to nobody in particular. “I’ve said this before: Your toughest player cannot be your point guard.”

This is how Barkley talks when the cameras are turned off, and it’s not that different from the larger-than-life persona he’s cultivated in 13 years as a broadcaster. In fact, he repeats that “flea” comment almost verbatim on the air later.

“That’s just Chuck,” Johnson says. “There’s no act. That’s the whole Charles Barkley package. That’s why people like him.”

The loose, conversational vibe of Inside wouldn’t work if the cast members didn’t genuinely enjoy being around each other. They constantly poke fun at each other’s clothes and weight. Nobody takes themselves very seriously. It often feels like the viewer is a fly on the wall watching former NBA stars hanging out in one of their living rooms, watching the games and talking trash.

“If somebody does something stupid, or somebody wears something crazy, we point it out,” says Johnson.

One time, his tailor made him a new suit that was tan and pinstriped, a little more outlandish than his normal attire. Against his better judgment, he wore it to an Inside taping.

“Kenny and Charles came out for pregame, and I was sitting there making some notes, and they looked at me and then looked at each other and didn’t say anything,” Johnson recalls. “And I said, ‘Oh, this is not going to be good. They’re going to kill me on the show.’ Then we go on the air, and they’re both just like ‘Oh, you stylin’ tonight.’ Or ‘You’re a pimp, Ernie.’”

The 57-year-old Johnson can dish it out as well as he can take it with the former NBA superstars. Barkley is a notorious neat freak in the green room, so Johnson is fond of putting pistachio shells on his desk when he gets up, which annoys Barkley to no end.

“It’s almost like big brothers and little brothers,” Johnson says. “It’s a family vibe. I never had brothers. I had two older sisters, so for me, this is as close as I’ve gotten to having brothers who pick on you and you pick on them.”

That family dynamic works well for the ex-players on the show, for whom it can evoke their playing days.

“People ask if I miss basketball and the truth is, I don’t miss the travel,” says Webber. “But I miss the locker room, and that’s what I get here.”

As Turner enters the 30th year of its partnership with the NBA, the league is expanding even further into the realm of social media. But the linchpin is still Inside, the program that shows above all else how this partnership benefits both parties.

“We’re an entertainment company that does sports,” says Barry. “And being an entertainment network, we have a certain amount of license to straddle that line and be a little more creative about how we approach telecasts.”

The reason Inside the NBA has been so successful for so long is that the panelists are able to keep the show lighthearted enough to appeal to casual fans without dumbing down the game analysis or alienating the serious basketball fans. That’s a difficult line to walk, but the show has hit upon the perfect combination of talent and chemistry.

“It’s guys in the living room hanging out and arguing while watching highlights,” says Johnson. “That was a bit of an adjustment for me, because up until then, my whole career had just been, ‘Highlight, don’t miss a play, don’t misidentify the player.’ “But here I’m trying to show a play and the guys are just going back and forth. It’s really different for me. And really fun.”

Says Barkley: “I get paid to watch basketball. I have the best job in the world.”