League a step closer to closing $76 billion media rights deals
LAS VEGAS — The NBA’s Board of Governors approved the league’s next media rights deals with Disney, NBC and Amazon Prime Video at its meeting Tuesday, moving the league one giant step closer to finalizing the 11-year agreements that will be worth about $76 billion.
Now comes the next, and possibly final, step: seeing if Warner Bros. Discovery will match one of the deals in an effort to extend a relationship with the NBA that dates to the late 1980s. WBD has five days to match, that clock starting to run when it receives the contracts from the league.
NBA Commissioner Adam Silver, citing the ongoing process, declined to offer specifics on when that five-day window starts or whether it has already started.
“Without getting into the specifics of the deal, I’d say philosophically we set out with certain goals in these negotiations and part of them were economic and part of them also led to what are the best ways we can serve our fans going forward,” Silver said. “Part of it was to get additional broadcast exposure, and hopefully we will have accomplished that. And also, to get more streaming connectivity with our fans, because in terms of traditional television — while still vital — there is a large portion of our fan base that no longer subscribes to those services.”
The new deals, which as currently constructed would keep the NBA on ESPN and ABC plus add NBC and Amazon to the mix, will begin in the 2025-26 season. This coming season marks the end of a nine-year, $24 billion deal that was record-seing for the NBA — and the new deal will shatter those records, both in terms of length and value.
“We wanted to make sure that going forward that our games will be accessible for our fans through various streaming services,” Silver said. “So, that’s something that we’ve been very focused on in these deals, and not just on reach in the United States, but reach globally as well.”
Much of the basic framework of the new deals, if they become reality, have already emerged. ESPN and ABC will keep the league’s top package, including the NBA Finals — which have been on ABC since 2003 — and one of the conference finals series, plus a slew of regular season contests.
NBC, which would return as a broadcast partner for the first time since 2002, would showcase games on Sunday night once the NFL season has ended, plus air games on Tuesdays throughout the regular season and stream a Monday night package on Peacock. Prime Video would have games on Thursday night after it is done carrying NFL games. Its other nights would be Friday and Saturday.
NBC and Prime Video would alternate who carries the other conference final.
NBA Cup tiebreakers
A mild tweak has been made to the group play tiebreaker system for the in-season tournament, now called the Emirates NBA Cup.
Overtime scoring has been removed from the point differential and total points tiebreakers. Those are the second and third tiebreakers, after head-tohead record, in group play.
It doesn’t totally remove the differential, and that tiebreaker led to some weirdness last season. Boston was intentionally fouling Chicago up by 32 points with 7 minutes left in a group play game last season to try and ensure it would win any tiebreakers. And New York advanced to the quarterfinals on point differential over Cleveland, Orlando and Brooklyn.
“I understand the concept,” Knicks guard Josh Hart said last season of the point differential tiebreaker. “But it’s weird.”
Flopping rule
The in-game flopping penalty is now permanent, after a one-year trial this past season convinced the league to go forward.
When flopping is called in-game now, the offending player is charged with a non-unsportsmanlike technical foul and the opposing team is awarded one free throw — to be attempted by any player who is in the game when the technical is assessed.
A player cannot be ejected from a game based on flopping violations.
Expansion
As Silver has said many times, once the league’s collective bargaining agreement and media deals get done, the next major project for the NBA will be looking at whether it’s time for expansion.
“I think we will engage this fall, in earnest, in the process of making those determinations — should we expand and if we were to expand, how many teams should we expand,” Silver said.