The high-stakes showdown could land the parties in court and keep the outcome of the NBA’s broadcast rights deal in limbo for the foreseeable future.
“We are proud of how we have delivered for basketball fans by providing best-in-class coverage throughout our four-decade partnership with the NBA. In an effort to continue our long-standing partnership, during both exclusive and non-exclusive negotiation periods, we acted in good faith to present strong offers that were fair to both parties,” TNT, formerly known as Turner Sports, wrote in a statement.
“We look forward to the NBA executing our new contract,” TNT added.
An NBA spokesman said the league has received the WBD’s proposal and is reviewing it.
The NBA can either challenge the proposal or accept it, meaning TNT would simply stick with the Amazon deal. If the league challenges it, as expected, WBD would have the option to sue the league.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.
The NBA is on the verge of getting a massive pile of money from ESPN, Comcast and Amazon in its new round of deals that would take effect after next season. According to media reports and people familiar with the deals, ESPN will pay $2.6 billion a year for the NBA Finals, among other games; 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 still includes playoff games and some conference finals series. (TNT’s public statement did not specify that it was specifically matching the Amazon deal.)
The league had an exclusive negotiating window with its previous partners — Disney-owned ESPN and WBD-owned TNT — that ended in April, and has spent the past several months finalizing its new deals. But according to people familiar with the previous deals, those networks have what are known as back-end matchmaking rights, making it harder for a league or content provider to ditch a media partner.
The strength of those matching rights could be a matter of debate. The NBA is hopeful that its terms with Amazon are different enough that WBD’s offer isn’t a true match. Amazon offers a streaming platform, and TNT is a cable network. And Prime Video has more subscribers than WBD’s streaming platform, Max. Meanwhile, within TNT, there’s a belief that the details of distribution are less important than the financial terms of Amazon, which it will match.
A person familiar with the negotiations said WBD has made several attempts to reach a new deal with the league, including taking on a smaller fourth package of games and also trying to recruit Google’s YouTube to partner in a joint challenge to the Amazon deal.
TNT has broadcast the NBA since 1989 and is the league’s longest-running media partner. It airs the venerable “Inside the NBA” pre- and postgame show, starring Charles Barkley, one of the most well-known personalities in sports media. Barkley has criticized TNT after reports in recent months that the network would lose the NBA. “These people I work with have ruined everything, clearly,” Barkley said on “The Dan Patrick Show” in May.