NBA, WBD Lawsuit Could Bleed Into 2025-26 Season if Not Dismissed
NBA, WBD Lawsuit Could Bleed Into 2025-26 Season if Not Dismissed
Despite the parties agreeing to an expedited resolution, there may be a long wait to see how WBD’s lawsuit turns out.
Sports fans can be forgiven these days if they’re failing to keep track of all the various sports media lawsuits underway currently. One of the bigger cases on the docket is Warner Bros. Discovery's lawsuit against the NBA, which is trying to claw back a package of broadcasting rights from the league after seeing it try to move on from TNT. Sports attorney Daniel Wallach has provided updates on the case since it first began, and took to social media over the weekend to confirm that WBD and the NBA have agreed to expedite the case’s resolution should it fail to be dismissed by the New York Supreme Court. But even with an accelerated schedule, the lawsuit could drag on past the start of the 2025-26 NBA season, further complicating matters.
Key Details:
- The NBA agreed to deals with Amazon, ESPN, and NBC starting in 2025, leaving TNT out of the loop.
- WBD is suing on grounds that its matching rights to try and reclaim a rights package were improperly disregarded by the NBA.
- The NBA has already filed a motion to dismiss the case, and WBD must respond to that motion by Sept. 20.
The expedited schedule for WBD’s lawsuit against the NBA will only be relevant if the New York Supreme Court decides not to dismiss the case. That could well happen, as the league filed a motion requesting a dismissal in late August. WBD has until Sept. 20 to respond to that motion, and the process could wrap up before the end of 2024 if the case is ultimately dismissed.
If it is not, however, even the expedited trial schedule could lead to the lawsuit not being resolved until the start of the 2025-26 NBA season. The discovery period would end on Jan. 24, 2025, and depositions would finish by March 21. A trial would begin by April at the latest, but considering how long such litigation could take, plus factoring in any appeals, it’s entirely possible that the trial might not wrap up by the time the NBA season begins in October 2025.
That could be a recipe for disaster for the league; Prime Video was awarded rights to the package of NBA games that WBD is seeking to reclaim, and — in the NBA’s nightmare scenario — might start actually broadcasting games next season, only to see them pulled off of the streamer and sent back to TNT if a jury eventually rules in WBD’s favor.
WBD is suing because it claims its right to match Amazon’s offer for the “C” package of NBA games was improperly discarded by the Association. In the 2014 deal between the NBA and WBD, the company won a contractual provision saying it could match any offer that would see games pulled off TNT. For its part, the NBA says that a dollar-for-dollar match doesn’t constitute a fully matching offer, since Prime Video’s streaming-only deal has greater reach than TNT even though WBD now offers its NBA games on Max as well as linear TV.
The company could have asked for a preliminary injunction to keep Amazon from taking ownership of the “C” package while the case continues, but as Wallach wrote on X (the social media platform formerly known as Twitter), the time for such a remedy may have already passed.
May be too late now. The scheduling order makes no mention of need for immediate injunctive relief. If a party doesn’t seek such relief early on in the case, it will be deemed to have waived its right to claim irreparable harm (an essential element for a preliminary injunction).
— Daniel Wallach (@WALLACHLEGAL) September 1, 2024
A preliminary injunction is exactly what halted the joint venture sports streaming service Venu Sports in its tracks last month. Fubo asked for such relief against the JV streamer from Disney, Fox, and WBD on the grounds that if the service were allowed to hit the market in late August as planned, Fubo would suffer irreparable harm while it awaited the trial process to play out in its antitrust lawsuit against the service. Evidently, WBD has chosen not to pursue a similar strategy against the NBA.
The NBA is set to make more than $75 billion over the course of 11 years in its new TV contracts. ABC and ESPN were awarded the “A” rights package for $2.6 billion per season, while NBC and Peacock got their hands on the “B” package for $2.5 billion yearly. Amazon’s bid of $1.93 billion for the “C” package is the offer WBD attempted to match, leading to a lawsuit that may not be resolved for more than a year.
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