The NBA on Tuesday night took the next significant step toward securing its new round of media-rights deals, as the league’s Board of Governors voted to approve the offers from Disney, Comcast and Amazon.
Speaking to the press in Las Vegas shortly after 7 p.m. local time, NBA commissioner Adam Silver confirmed that the league owners had signed off on the papered bids, which together amount to an 11-year, $75.9 billion juggernaut. But beyond the revelation that the board has voted to accept the offers, Silver wasn’t at liberty to add much in the way of detail.
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This, of course, has to do with the possibility that Warner Bros. Discovery, the NBA’s longest-serving TV distributor, may choose to take legal action that might delay or otherwise derail the deal. In a show of caution and not just a little deference to the league’s 40-year partnership with TNT, Silver did not explicitly name any of the incoming or outgoing suitors.
“I know there’s a lot of interest in our new media deals,” Silver said before fielding questions from the media. “This is still an ongoing process. There was discussion of those at our board today and we did approve this stage of those media proposals, but as you all know, there are other rights that need to be worked through with existing partners.”
When asked if Warner Bros. Discovery’s five-day window in which to make a matching bid had commenced, Silver apologized before going on to say, “I can’t get into the machinations yet about how those contracts work.”
It is believed that the NBA plans to send the contracts to WBD on Wednesday, whereupon the five-day countdown will officially begin.
While the commish was necessarily stingy with the details, Silver did allow that he believes the new deals will satisfy all the goals the league set before negotiations began with the incumbents on March 9. Naturally, boosting media revenues was a key objective for the league and its owners, but choosing viable distribution platforms was also of primary importance.
“I think part of [our objective] was to get additional broadcast exposure, and hopefully we will have accomplished that, and also to get more streaming connectivity with our fans,” Silver said, noting that a large portion of the NBA’s younger-skewing fan base have never subscribed to a traditional pay-TV bundle. With NBC onboard, the NBA will air up to three weekly primetime games on a big-reach broadcast network, while the addition of Amazon would put the league in front of a global subscriber base of 200 million consumers, virtually overnight.
In the absence of a crystal ball, it’s anyone’s guess as to how WBD will respond, but any legal challenge likely would make it next to impossible to estimate when the rights deals will be made street legal. Silver flat-out said he doesn’t “have a sense” of how long it’ll take to get things over the finish line, before adding, “Much of it is outside my control. We’ll see.”
Before signing off for the night, Silver confirmed that the board today had discussed New York Knicks owner James Dolan’s written denunciation of the rights deals. Among other things, Dolan criticized the NBA for “deemphasizing and depowering” the local RSNs in favor of the national TV networks. Per Dolan’s complaint, the increase in nationally-televised games under the 2025-36 contracts threatens to “completely eliminate” the RSNs; in other words, the subsequent “reduction in available games … risks rendering the entire RSN model unviable.”
Silver did not say how the vote tally shook out, but as was expected, Dolan wasn’t on hand to cast his ballot. Since resigning from the NBA’s advisory/finance and media committees last November, Dolan has been represented at BOG meetings by MSG Sports Corp. chief operating officer Jamaal Lesane.
Whether the vote count ran 30-0 or 29-1 (or 29-0, with one abstention) in favor is immaterial, as the approval did not hinge on unanimity.
Silver kept mum about the Dolan missive. “We try to keep these issues in the family,” he said, before confirming that the board had a conversation about the letter earlier in the afternoon. The rest was passed over in silence.
“I don’t think it’s appropriate to get into the specifics about what was discussed,” Silver said.
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