NBA Goes a Huge Step Closer to Concluding New 11-year Media Rights Agreements

The NBA's Board of Governors authorized the league's next media rights deals with Disney, NBC, and Amazon Prime Video during its meeting on Tuesday, bringing the league one step closer to concluding the 11-year agreements, which will be valued approximately USD 76 billion.

The next, and possibly last, stage is to see if Warner Bros. Discovery will match one of the deals in a move to extend its partnership with the NBA, which stretches back to the late 1980s. WBD has five days to match, with the clock starting when it receives the contracts from the league. Citing the current process, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver declined to say when or if the five-day timeframe will begin.

"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 told the audience. "One of the goals was to increase broadcast exposure, which we hope to have done. Also, to increase streaming connectivity with our followers, because while conventional television is still important, a significant section of our fan base no longer subscribes to those services."

The new deals, which, as currently designed, would maintain the NBA on ESPN and ABC while adding NBC and Amazon to the mix, will begin in the 2025–26 season. This season marks the end of a nine-year, $24 billion contract that set NBA records — and the new deal will break those records, both in 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 told the crowd. "So, that's something that we've been very focused on in these deals, and not just on reaching the United States, but reach globally as well."

Much of the basic architecture for the new partnerships has already been established, if they become a reality. ESPN and ABC will continue to broadcast the league's top package, which includes the NBA Finals (which have been on ABC since 2003), one of the conference finals series, and a plethora of regular-season games.

NBC, which would return as a broadcast partner for the first time since 2002, would telecast games on Sunday nights after the NFL season concluded, as well as games on Tuesdays during the regular season and a Monday night package on Peacock. Prime Video would have games on Thursday night after it finished broadcasting NFL games. The other evenings would be Friday and Saturday.

NBC and Prime Video would alternate carrying the other conference final.

The group play tiebreaker mechanism for the in-season event, now known as the Emirates NBA Cup, has been somewhat tweaked.

Overtime scoring has been excluded from the point differential and total points tiebreaker calculations. These are the second and third tiebreakers in group play, following head-to-head record. It doesn't completely eliminate the differential, and that tiebreaker caused some confusion last season. Boston purposefully fouled Chicago with 7 minutes left in a group play game last season to assure it won any tiebreakers. New York progressed to the quarterfinals on a point differential over Cleveland, Orlando, and Brooklyn.

"I understand the concept," Knicks guard Josh Hart said last season about the point difference tiebreaker. "But it's weird."

The in-game flopping penalty is now permanent, following a one-year experiment last season that encouraged the league to move forward.

When flopping is called in-game, the offending player is penalized with a non-unsportsmanlike technical foul, and the other team is awarded one free throw, which can be taken by any player present when the technical is assessed.

A player cannot be removed from a game due to flopping offenses. As Silver has stated numerous times, once the league's collective bargaining agreement and media agreements are completed, the next major assignment for the NBA will be determining whether it is ready 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," stated Silver.