A suite of new documents unsealed Tuesday in the lawsuit between Warner Bros. Discovery and the NBA shed further light on the league’s new media rights deal that will kick in with the 2025-26 season.
The documents outline how different NBA broadcasts will look starting next season — not just with new partners, but also new nights. By February, the NBA could be on a national broadcast every night of the week.
The NBA ushered in two new media rights partners with the deal — Amazon and NBC — and retained ESPN and ABC. Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns TNT Sports, sued to retain a part of the NBA’s rights. Warner Bros. Discovery claims that matching rights in the current agreement allow the company to maintain Amazon’s package. That court case remains ongoing.
A spokesperson for Amazon declined to comment, and representatives TNT Sports did not immediately respond to The Athletic’s request for comment.
The unsealed documents reveal that Amazon will broadcast 60 games per season as part of the 11-year contract with the NBA, including an opening week doubleheader, according to a redacted contract unsealed in New York State Supreme Court. The NBA’s contracts with NBC and what its deal with WBD would be were also unsealed.
Amazon will air one to two games every year on Black Friday after it airs its NFL game, if Amazon has one that year. The company will have two distinct NBA windows. Amazon’s Thursday night broadcasts will start after the end of the NFL season, while the company will air games on Friday all season long. The games will be on Amazon’s base subscription tier.
Amazon will air the entirety of the NBA Cup’s knockout stage, as well as the semifinals and final. The company will also broadcast the Play-In Tournament and 14 to 26 games per season during the first two rounds of the playoffs, as well as three Eastern Conference finals and three Western Conference finals over the course of the 11-year contract.
Amazon will also create new theme music for the NBA broadcasts as part of the agreement.
NBC will air 100 NBA games per season as part of its new deal, with an opening night doubleheader, likely on a Tuesday. The company will air games on Peacock on Monday nights and on NBC on Tuesdays. Those Tuesday games will have different regional distributions, akin to how NFL games are split by different geographical windows.
NBC will also broadcast games on at least eight Sunday nights, though those won’t begin until after the end of the NFL season. The network will broadcast a minimum of 22 playoff games plus 11 “if necessary” games each season over the first two playoff rounds, as well as six conference finals (the first will be in 2026 and alternate years from then on).
ESPN will continue to air games on Wednesday night. It will also air games on Saturday and Sunday, though the weekend games are likely to come during the second half of the season.
“There’s lessons learned certainly from our national deals in terms of the marketplace interest, in the streaming of premium sports, and sort of the return to the past of additional interest from broadcast,” NBA commissioner Adam Silver said in September. “I mean, for example, we dramatically increased the number of broadcast exposures in this deal from where we were, to a point from my early days in the league, almost unthinkable that we could command, we the NBA, given where our relative ratings were in the old days, that much primetime exposure from ABC and NBC, which are both built into our new deal.”
Required reading
(Photo: Victor Boyko / Getty Images for NBC Universal)
