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The NBA is in the home stretch of finalizing its new broadcast rights deal, which will begin in 2025-26 and run for 11 years with partners Disney, NBC Universal and Amazon.
TNT, which was the company that held them for 25 years, lost the rights but has until this coming Monday to match the 2.2 billion-dollar deal with NBCU or the 1.8 billion-dollar retransmission-only deal with Amazon.
It is unclear whether the NBA has the right to reject a similar offer from TNT, with additional complications stemming from its first exclusive streaming deal with Amazon.
TNT could match Amazon's deal to keep the NBA on its programming, but will be limited to offering it only on Internet streaming, possibly bringing the NBA to its Max streaming service.
TNT could lose 600 million dollars
The NBA has been preparing with its lawyers for the possibility that TNT will complicate the situation by trying to block its new media rights deal, so everyone should keep a close eye on how the situation plays out through to Monday.
TNT could lose 600 million dollars if the NBA broadcast rights go to another company.
Warner Bros. CEO David Zaslav will regret making an enemy of NBA commissioner Adam Silver, as his criticizm of the overvaluation of NBA broadcast rights has landed him in this situation after holding NBA rights for more than 25 years.
Barkley's harsh criticism
Former player Charles Barkley, who stars alongside Shaquille O'Neal, Ernie Johnson and Kenny Smith in one of the most popular NBA halftime and postgame sports programs in the United States, exploded after learning that his company, TNT, was about to lose the league's television rights.
This time he changed his usual humorous tone for a fierce criticism of his bosses for it.
"Morale is at rock bottom, simple as that. I feel really bad for the people I work with," Barkley said on the Dan Patrick show.
"Those people I work with have clearly screwed everything up and we have no idea what's going to happen. I don't feel good, I'm not going to lie, especially when they said yesterday, 'We've bought college soccer.' I was like, 'Damn, they could have used that money to buy the NBA!' It's funny because we just won the award for best studio program and these clowns, these fools that I work with, turned us from Inglenook and Opus into Ripple and Boone's Farm and Thunderbird," he said.