NBA and TNT’s parent company prepare for legal clash in sports rights battle for the ages

Analysis by Oliver Darcy, CNN

New York (CNN) — The stage is now officially set for a high-stakes showdown between the NBA and TNT parent company Warner Bros. Discovery.

The league on Wednesday rejected WBD’s offer to match a $1.8 billion per year bid from Amazon to broadcast the games, an expected move that pits the David Zaslav-led entertainment conglomerate against the Adam Silver-led league and sends the parties careening toward a messy legal fight.

“Warner Bros. Discovery’s most recent proposal did not match the terms of Amazon Prime Video’s offer and, therefore, we have entered into a long-term arrangement with Amazon,” the NBA said in a statement.

WBD, the parent company of CNN, paid for matching rights when it struck its current deal with the NBA. It now argues that it should be able to match Amazon’s streaming agreement with the league, since it can air the games both on cable channel TNT and its Max platform, which boasts about 100 million paid subscribers.

The NBA, however, apparently disagrees. The league sent a letter to WBD on Wednesday, as first reported by CNBC, contending that its “internet distribution” deal with Amazon was exclusively for streaming. In doing so, the NBA argued that WBD’s offer was not a legally valid match since it would also be broadcasting the games on TNT.

Citing that contractual provision seems odd, to say the least, given that one would think the NBA would want the added exposure of TNT, which features “Inside the NBA,” widely recognized as one of the top sports programs of all time. And it should be noted that the contractual paperwork giving WBD matching rights is pages long and not simple. Zaslav and his deputies believe that they have a robust legal argument and that they are indeed entitled to use their contractual rights to match Amazon’s bid.

What everyone probably can agree on is that this negotiation has gotten very messy — and that’s not good for either party.

Each side, however, is dug in. And now their legal arguments will almost certainly be tested in court as the dispute between the league and its longtime broadcast partner veers toward ugly litigation. A person familiar with the matter told CNN on Wednesday evening that WBD is preparing to take legal action “soon.” And the prospects for an out-of-court settlement between the two parties appears slim, given WBD’s confidence that it has a strong case.

“We have matched the Amazon offer, as we have a contractual right to do, and do not believe the NBA can reject it,” a TNT spokesperson flatly said in the company’s official statement. “We think they have grossly misinterpreted our contractual rights with respect to the 2025-26 season and beyond, and we will take appropriate action.”

In addition to its agreement with Amazon, the NBA also struck deals with NBCUniversal and Disney. In total, the combined package will send some $77 billion into the NBA’s coffers over the next 11 years. For a while, industry insiders focused on how NBCU had swooped in and struck a deal with the NBA for a package that included many of the games WBD’s TNT currently airs.

But WBD ultimately declined to match NBC’s $2.5 billion per year bid. Instead, WBD opted to target Amazon’s smaller package for a match, given the lower price tag and belief that it contained more-coveted games. If Zaslav can manage to ultimately win the rights to air the games in court, it will amount to quite a coup d’état for the WBD boss. Of course, if Zaslav does not prevail after waging an unprecedented fight against the NBA, it will be a major black eye.

And there is already plenty of finger pointing going around.

“TNT dropped the ball here,” ESPN analyst Stephen A. Smith said Wednesday. “I’m talking about the brass at TNT. It started years ago when they alluded to how unimportant the NBA was to the brand itself and the resistance that they gave in reaching a new deal.”

Regardless of who ultimately emerges victorious, the face-off raises a host of questions about the industry and whether it is only the first of the major sporting leagues to opt to send a bulk of their games to Big Tech platforms instead of the traditional media business.

In the years ahead, tech goliaths such as Amazon can — and likely will — offer large sums to sports leagues to win the lucrative rights to air the games, sweetening the allure of their bids with promises of infusing the viewing experience with newfangled technology.

Within the next decade, will Amazon, Apple, and Google be the primary homes of live sports? If so, what does that mean for traditional media companies that rely on those assets as a key engine of their businesses? And, given Big Tech’s less-than-ideal record on issues such as privacy, what does that mean for society at large?

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