The NBA has filed a motion to dismiss the Warner Brothers Discovery lawsuit in the New York Supreme Court stemming from the league’s new broadcast partnership with Amazon. The motion is the latest in the ongoing broadcast rights saga between the former league partner and the NBA.
Earlier this summer, the league ratified a new 11 year, $76B media rights deal with Disney, NBA and Amazon Prime which will come into effect in 2025-26. The new deal will effectively end a nearly 40 year partnership between the NBA and Turner, which had been airing games since 1984-85.
As part of its filing, the league mentioned that “TBS chose not to match NBCUniversal’s offer, which would have enabled TBS to continue distributing games via its TNT linear cable network…Instead, TBS purported to match the less-expensive Amazon offer, but only after revising it to include traditional distribution rights and making numerous other substantive changes.”
In short, the NBA’s lawyers believe that “Far from accepting each term of Amazon’s offer, TBS’s revisions constituted a counteroffer that the NBA was free to reject… Even if TBS did have the right to match Amazon’s offer, it certainly did not have the right to fundamentally change the method of distribution required by Amazon’s offer, the NBA’s first ‘streaming national media rights deal.'”
Evidently, WBD continues to feel differently about how the bidding process played out, noting that “Not only is it our contractual right,” the TNT Sports statement read, “but it is in the best interest of the fans who want to continue to enjoy our industry-leading NBA content with the choice and flexibility we offer them through our widely distributed platforms including TNT and Max. We will file our opposition in the coming weeks.”
WBD will have until September 20th to respond to the NBA’s motion to dismiss the suit.
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