The high-stakes showdown could drag both parties into court and leave the outcome of NBA broadcasting rights in limbo for the time being.
“Through our 40-year partnership with the NBA, we are proud to have served basketball fans by providing the finest broadcasts. To continue our longstanding partnership, we acted in good faith during the exclusive and non-exclusive negotiation periods and presented a strong bid that was fair to both parties,” TNT, formerly known as Turner Sports, said in a statement.
TNT added that it “expects the NBA to enforce the new agreement.”
An NBA spokesman said the league has received WBD’s proposal and is considering it.
The NBA can choose to either contest the proposal or accept it, meaning TNT would take over its contract with Amazon. If the NBA contests it, as expected, WBD would have the option to sue the NBA.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.
The NBA is poised to reap huge profits from ESPN, Comcast and Amazon in a new round of contracts that take effect after next season. ESPN will pay $2.6 billion a year for games including the NBA Finals; Comcast, which owns NBC, will pay $2.5 billion for regular-season and playoff games; and Amazon will pay $1.8 billion for a smaller package that includes playoff games and some conference finals series, according to media reports and people familiar with the deals. (TNT’s official statement did not specify whether it would match Amazon’s deal specifically.)
The league has spent the past few months finalizing new deals after an exclusivity negotiating period ended in April with previous partners, Disney-owned ESPN and WBD-owned TNT. But those networks have what are called back-end matching rights, making it difficult for the league or content providers to abandon their media partners, according to people familiar with the previous deals.
The strength of those matching rights may be a point of contention. The NBA hopes WBD’s proposal is not a true match because its terms with Amazon are different enough: Amazon offers a streaming platform; TNT is a cable network; and Prime Video has more subscribers than WBD’s streaming platform, Max. Meanwhile, there is a view within TNT that the details of distribution are less important than Amazon’s financial terms, which TNT would match.
The WBD has tried several times to reach a new agreement with the league, including scaling back the size of its fourth-game package and partnering with Google-owned YouTube to jointly compete against Amazon’s deal, according to a person familiar with the negotiations.
TNT has aired the NBA since 1989 and is the league’s longest-standing media partner. It presents the venerable “Inside the NBA” pre- and post-game show, featuring one of the most recognizable figures in sports media, Charles Barkley. Barkley has criticized TNT after reports in recent months said the network was dropping its NBA coverage. The NBA will lose. “The people that I work with obviously screwed this up,” Barkley said. He spoke on “The Dan Patrick Show” in May..
