Mark Cuban Offers Outside-the-Box Idea for How Warner Bros. Discovery Can Keep the NBA
Cuban’s idea centers around TNT acquiring local rights to NBA teams currently held by Diamond Sports Group.
The NBA’s matching rights saga continues. On Monday, Warner Bros. Discovery and its subsidiary TNT Sports informed the NBA that it would be exercising a clause in the broadcast contract between the two that allows WBD to match a third-party offer for a package of national broadcast rights. WBD is willing to pay $1.8 billion per season for a package intended for Amazon’s Prime Video, which includes regular season and playoff games as well as the NBA Cup In-Season Tournament. The NBA is widely expected to find grounds to reject WBD’s matching offer, which will almost certainly lead to either a lawsuit, or at least the threat of one, before the process is over. But a new suggestion from Dallas Mavericks minority owner Mark Cuban could allow the NBA to sidestep that lawsuit, and for WBD to save face by continuing as an NBA broadcast partner past the 2024-25 season.
Key Details:
- Cuban suggested that Turner channels begin offering NBA games not to national, but to regional audiences starting in the new TV deal.
- His plan hinges on WBD acquiring the NBA rights currently held by Diamond Sports Group and expanding from there.
- Distributors would be able to keep Turner’s carriage fees consistent since they could justify paying less to regional sports networks.
Cuban’s proposal was laid out on X (the social media platform formerly known as Twitter) on Monday evening, in the wake of news that WBD had decided to try and match the Amazon offer. His post made multiple references to TBS, which is a bit odd because WBD’s NBA coverage has thus far been offered on TNT. It’s likely that Cuban simply switched the two Turner networks in his mind while writing, though he has not confirmed this in any follow-up posts.
My suggestion would be that they get diamond local rights, and overlay the games on TBS for local broadcast.
— Mark Cuban (@mcuban) July 23, 2024
Maybe lease a stick to expand coverage and of course streaming.
Start with 15 diamond markets or so, and others as they expire
It justifies their subscription fee…
Cuban’s suggestion is for WBD to pursue the local NBA rights currently held by Diamond Sports Group, which offers in-market NBA contests not being shown on national channels in 15 markets on Bally Sports cable channels. Cuban wants WBD to buy those local rights and put the games on Turner channels in their respective markets, as well as offer a streaming option, presumably via Max.
In Cuban’s mind, this would allow WBD to continue asking for a reasonably high carriage fee for its Turner channels going forward since it would still hold some NBA rights. Distributors would be willing to pay these fees because they wouldn’t have to pay as much to keep regional sports networks (RSNs) which no longer offer live NBA games.
“This way TBS has most of the USA covered with local games,” Cuban wrote. “They show the same reruns they would otherwise show with no NBA deal in the markets without games. Fans who have basic cable would get all their local games on a fully distributed network or on a local bleacher report stream.”
Is Cuban’s Plan Viable?
There are a few potential flaws in Cuban’s proposal, despite the out-of-the-box thinking it displays. One of the largest is that it continues the strategy of offering a big selection of NBA games to local audiences via cable channels. To be sure, TNT is offered in basic cable packages more frequently than RSNs are these days, but the NBA’s new national TV deal pulls games off RSNs and puts them on national platforms precisely because the league wants to expand access to as wide an audience as possible.
Another sticky problem for WBD, if it wanted to follow Cuban’s advice, is the prospect of acquiring rights from Diamond Sports Group. Diamond is still working through bankruptcy proceedings, but has every intention of emerging from Chapter 11 protections as a going concern. Its NBA rights are an incredibly important piece of that puzzle, and it likely wouldn’t sell them to WBD unless it knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that it wasn’t going to emerge as a viable company again. If that were to happen, the company would likely try to send its NBA rights to the open market instead of selling them to WBD without entertaining other offers.
The fight between the NBA and WBD could get nasty, depending on how desperate the company is to cling to its basketball rights. Cuban’s suggestion could certainly help both sides avoid that fight, but it’s probably not all that workable in the end.
Max
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