The apparent collapse of the largest RSN station owner has apparently sped up the NBA’s plans to sell a package of local rights.
John Ourand of Puck reported Thursday that the NBA hopes to bundle a package of local rights to sell as soon as next season and has already begun talks with streamers, including Amazon, ESPN, Google, Apple and DAZN.
It had already been reported by Tom Friend of Sports Business Journal last summer that the NBA planned to centralize at least some portion of its local media rights by the 2027-28 season, but the timeline would seem to have been accelerated by the imminent collapse of Main Street Sports Group, operator of the FanDuel Sports Network RSNs. Friend and Mike Mazzeo noted in December that the Main Street situation had created “urgency” for the NBA to launch a centralized option in time for next season.
Once Main Street winds down operations, whether abruptly midseason or at the end of the season in April, it will free up local rights to nearly half of NBA teams — 13 total. The NBA had been expecting 20 teams to be available for a potential 2027-28 launch, per Friend’s report last summer.
Mazzeo and Friend wrote in December that the NBA could pair those Main Street teams — the Bucks, Cavaliers, Clippers, Grizzlies, Hawks, Heat, Hornets, Magic, Pacers, Pistons, Spurs, Thunder and Timberwolves — with five others whose games currently air on local broadcast television, the Jazz, Mavericks, Pelicans, Suns and Trail Blazers. That would bring the total number of teams to 18.
Their report suggested that the package could expand to 28 teams between the four who own their RSNs (the Bulls, Rockets, Nuggets and Wizards), the five whose games air on NBC Sports-owned RSNs (the 76ers, Celtics, Kings and Warriors) and the Nets, each of which were described as potentially willing to opt into a national streaming package.
Adding in the Lakers, who are potentially facing the potential sale — or bankruptcy — of their Spectrum SportsNet RSN, it is possible that the Knicks would be the only holdout. Knicks owner James Dolan owns the RSN MSG Network and has been critical of the impact of the league’s new national media rights deal on local broadcasts.
Major League Baseball last year sold ESPN in-market streaming rights to teams whose games are produced and distributed by the league. At the time of the deal, that only included six teams. But now, at least 14 teams have their production and distribution handled by MLB. (ESPN will not begin exercising its digital distribution rights until 2027.)
That ESPN deal is essentially a short-term patch until a far larger deal in 2028, when all of the MLB media rights are up for bid. ESPN MLB writer Jeff Passan was the latest to report Thursday that MLB hopes to make all of its rights — locally and nationally — available in the 2028 talks.
It is not clear whether the NBA might follow the same approach, selling a partial stopgap package until it is able to bundle all of its local rights at some point in the near future. Ourand reported Thursday that the NBA could have the ability to include all of its teams in a package as soon as two years from now.