And-Ones: NBA Media Rights, Kuzma, Poeltl, Blanks
Analysts at JPMorgan recently issued a report stating that the exponential growth of sports media rights is unsustainable in the long term, according to Mike Ozanian of Forbes, but the NBA remains on track to do extremely well on its next deal. The league’s nine-year, $24 billion agreement with its current partners expires in 2025 and the NBA will reportedly look to double or triple that amount on its next rights contract.
With some regional sports networks around the country struggling to make payments to teams, the NBA’s next media deal may lean more heavily on broadcast television and/or streaming platforms, creating alternatives for teams when their current agreements with RSNs expires, per Brian Windhorst and Tim Bontemps of ESPN.
Mike Vorkunov of The Athletic explores the same topic, citing a source with knowledge of the situation who says the NBA would like to get more games on broadcast television and fewer on cable in its next media rights deal. Vorkunov confirms that NBC has displayed interest in getting the NBA back and adds that several streamers – led by Amazon and Apple – are believed to have interest in broadcasting NBA games.
Here are more odds and ends from around the basketball world:
- After previously breaking down this summer’s free agent market for guards, Eric Pincus of Bleacher Report shifts his focus to 2023’s free agent wings and big men. Pincus suggests this year’s crop of wings isn’t especially deep and that most of the market’s top players – such as Wizards forward Kyle Kuzma – are far more likely to stay put than to change teams. Within his story on bigs, Pincus says multiple sources view the Raptors as a “lock” to re-sign Jakob Poeltl.
- John Hollinger of The Athletic shines a spotlight on the minimum-salary players who are making a difference for playoff teams, including Lakers guard Austin Reaves, Suns forward Josh Okogie, and Heat guard Gabe Vincent, among others. Those players will all be free agents this summer and are in position to receive significant raises.
- Lance Blanks, a former NBA player for the Pistons and Timberwolves, died on Wednesday at age 56, per The Detroit News. After retiring as a player, Blanks worked as a scout with the Spurs, then was later hired by the Cavaliers as an assistant general manager and by the Suns as their GM. Most recently, he served in a scouting role for the Clippers. “Lance was a light for all those who knew him,” former Pistons star Joe Dumars said in a statement. “It’s been a privilege to have called him one of my closest friends. I’m eternally grateful for all the support he has shown me throughout the years.” Mike Finger of The San Antonio Express-News has more on Blanks’ passing.
And-Ones: Media Rights, G League, Bledsoe, Beasley, Franklin
When the NBA negotiates its next television deal, expect the league to sell a separate package of streaming-only games, writes Michael McCarthy of Front Office Sports. As McCarthy outlines, the NFL and MLB have sold packages of games to Amazon and Apple in recent years, and the NBA is expected to follow suit, with Amazon in particular having made it clear it wants to get into business with the league.
“Amazon is locked and loaded for a shot at the NBA,” a source told Front Office Sports.
According to McCarthy, sports media consultant Patrick Crakes estimated that the bidding for a streaming-only NBA package could start in the neighborhood of $1 billion per year. The league’s current TV deal with ESPN/ABC and Turner Sports pays the league about $2.6 billion annually — the next rights deal is expected to double or triple that figure, McCarthy writes.
Here are a few more odds and ends from around the basketball world:
- While a deal with the NBA could be coming down the line, Amazon officially announced today that it has entered a partnership with Overtime Elite and will stream 20 OTE games in each of the next three seasons, as Mike Vorkunov of The Athletic details.
- With the NBA G League’s season set to tip off on Friday, ESPN’s Jonathan Givony, Bobby Marks, and Kevin Pelton (Insider link) break down what to watch for in 2022/23. Pelton identifies Joe Wieskamp, Saben Lee, Willie Cauley-Stein, Jamaree Bouyea, and Shabazz Napier as some top candidates for call-ups, while Givony notes that the G League Ignite’s roster will feature Scoot Henderson and a handful of other intriguing prospects.
- After reportedly reaching a deal to sign free agent guard Eric Bledsoe, the Shanghai Sharks have parted ways with forward Michael Beasley and guard Jamaal Franklin, two former NBA players, tweets Emiliano Carchia of Sportando. There was some uncertainty about whether the Sharks would move forward with their signing of Bledsoe following his arrest for misdemeanor domestic violence last month, but he won’t face any criminal charges in that case, according to a TMZ report.
- Yossi Gozlan of HoopsHype takes a closer look at the NBA’s rumored proposal of a league-wide hard cap, considering whether the idea could work and what the pros and cons would be.
NBA, TV Partners Sign $24 Billion Deal
9:05am: Commissioner Adam Silver also confirmed the arrangement in a press conference streamed via NBA.com, and the NBA has released a statement, too.
MONDAY, 8:40am: ABC/ESPN and Turner Sports, the subsidiary of Time Warner, have confirmed the deal in separate releases that detail their TV coverage plans. The NBA has a press conference scheduled shortly to discuss the new TV package.
SUNDAY, 10:30pm: One reason this NBA TV deal has such a high price tag is that by doing it prior to the existing agreements ending, it prevented FOX and NBC from making a play to secure broadcast rights, Tim Bontemps of The New York Post tweets.
9:36pm: The NBA and its television partners have agreed to a new nine-year deal, report Ben Cohen and Shalini Ramachandran of The Wall Street Journal report in a subscription-only piece. The combined annual rights fees that ABC/ESPN and Time Warner will pay surge from approximately $930MM to around $2.66 billion, tweets Richard Sandomir of The New York Times, making the full value of the arrangement $24 billion, as Sandomir notes in a full story. The deal kicks in for 2016/17 and runs through 2024/25.
The move had been expected, as John Lombardo and John Ourand of Sports Business Daily reported last month, though the fee is larger than the roughly $2 billion annual figure that seemed likely at the time. The increase appears to put the league in position to raise the salary cap even higher than anticipated, and in September some teams were already projecting that the cap, at $63.065MM this season, would leap to $80MM by the 2016/17 season, according to Grantland’s Zach Lowe. It’s unclear whether the league will phase in any such jump beginning with next season’s cap, or if the TV rights deal is backloaded, possibilities that Lowe heard had been in play.
The agreement also stands to affect the market value of franchises, particularly with at least part of the Nets on the market, as well as the league’s labor negotiations. The NBA and the players union each have an opt-out clause in the summer of 2017, and it seemed highly likely even before the TV deal that one or both sides would elect to get out of the existing CBA.