The NBA recently announced new 11-year media rights deals with The Walt Disney Company, NBCUniversal, and Amazon, which will serve as the television broadcast homes of live game broadcasts beginning in the 2025-26 season. The deals are reportedly worth a collective $77 billion, representing nearly triple of what the league is said to have received under its current agreement. Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns entities that have broadcast NBA games since the 1984-85 season, is suing the league for breach of contract after it rejected its exercise of matching rights in an attempt to retain these media rights. John Skipper, former president of ESPN who was involved in negotiations for the current media rights deal, delineated his perspective on how the NBA handled such negotiations.
After David Samson opined that NBA Commissioner Adam Silver planned to not do a deal with Warner Bros. Discovery and TNT Sports from the beginning, Skipper pushed back and defended the league. While he concurred with the point that the league wanted to add a third media rights package, he does not think that Silver entered these discussions with the intent to eliminate Warner Bros. Discovery. The company exited its exclusive, 90-day negotiating window without reaching a deal, after which discussions are reported to have commenced with Comcast’s NBCUniversal to bring the league back to its airwaves for the first time since 2002.
“The emergence of NBC probably changed all that calculus, but I do believe that [Silver] did make an offer to WBD,” Skipper said on the latest edition of The Sporting Class. “‘Yes, you can renew what you have now or most of what you have now for the following number,’ and it’s been reported that that number was around $2.3 billion, so I think he pivoted when they said ‘No,’ and again, it’s been reported that they thought that $2.1 billion was the most they would pay.”
Samson articulated that making such a pivot to closing deals with The Walt Disney Company, NBCUniversal and Amazon does not usually occur in a quick manner. The lack of genuine worry regarding the lawsuit from Warner Bros. Discovery and Silver’s ability to announce the deal with press releases and quotes indicate to Samson that there had been groundwork laid during the exclusive negotiating period. This led Skipper to ask why the NBA ostensibly presented Warner Bros. Discovery with a monetary figure that would allow them to retain broadcast rights.
“Have you ever made an offer to someone that you know they can’t accept or they won’t accept?,” Samson asked. “Sometimes it’s a lowball, sometimes it’s that you’re making them do something you know they can’t do, and that’s the whole case we’re in right now.”
Although the conversation being held was largely speculative, Skipper presumed that the league made a good-faith offer to Warner Bros. Discovery. The verbiage of ‘good faith’ was used in the lawsuit, which the NBA has until Aug. 12 to file answering papers. Warner Bros. Discovery contends that it matched the Amazon offer in accordance with provisions under its current agreements and is seeking preliminary and permanent injunctive relief to prohibit the NBA from licensing the broadcast rights to a third party.
The lawsuit particularly asserts that the definition of “non-broadcast television” includes methods of television, video distribution or transmission other than broadcast television “whether now known or hereafter developed.” Moreover, it states that TBS, a Warner Bros. Discovery subsidiary, has the right to match a third-party offer for NBA game rights “via any specific form of combined audio and video distribution.” The plaintiffs allege that the league intentionally delayed sending offers from Amazon and NBCUniversal to TBS in order to script provisions intended to impede the exercise of matching rights.
“All you have to have is one more better than you have packages,” Skipper said. “[The NBA] knew they had more than three bidders at some point. I don’t think that led them to go, ‘Well, we want to cut TNT out.’ I genuinely believe that at the start of the negotiation, they would have been quite happy if TNT and ESPN had renewed.’”
The reports of Amazon entering the exclusive negotiating window raise the possibility of a joint venture, something Skipper conjectures Warner Bros. Discovery could have been thinking with Amazon. Such a bid, he presumed, would not have been for the tertiary package of media rights, but rather for the primary or secondary compilation instead. NBCUniversal, however, was public throughout the negotiations, Skipper expressed, to ensure that Silver understood that if Warner Bros. Discovery did not step up, the company was there. When Skipper was negotiating media rights deals for ESPN, he would inform the leagues that they would discuss deals after the end of the exclusive window.
“Exclusive negotiating period doesn’t mean that you can’t talk to somebody and say, ‘I’ll be here for you,’” Skipper said, “but if you think that I’m kidding about ever sitting in a room with a league and going, ‘Here’s what I’ll do for you if they don’t pay you,’ I never did that.”
