David Zaslav and Adam Silver go head-to-head over NBA rights. Via Liam McGuire.

With the beginning of the 2024-2025 season, it’s the swan song for the NBA on TNT. Next season when the NBA’s massive new rights deals kick in, the NBA will move on to ESPN, NBC, and Amazon. Instead of continuing a beloved partnership, the NBA and Warner Bros. Discovery are locked in litigation over the rights deals. And Adam Silver made it very clear why things between the two sides broke down.

The conventional wisdom in the new NBA rights deals is that Silver was looking for a way to leave TNT and move games away from cable towards broadcast television and streaming. The NBA is getting exactly that with their new NBC and Amazon contracts to go along with ESPN holding much of their current rights portfolio.

But as Silver spoke to CNBC’s Alex Sherman for his new sports media newsletter, he said that the NBA and Warner Bros. Discovery “negotiated hard” for a lengthy period of time, but just couldn’t come to a deal. While that may be the diplomatic answer, Silver was a bit more forthcoming when talking about embattled WBD CEO David Zaslav and how the lack of a relationship had a negative effect on making a deal.

“It wasn’t a longtime relationship with the people currently running Warner Brothers Discovery,” said Silver. “Ideally in these partnerships, people aren’t pulling out the contract and saying page eight, paragraph three. You’re saying you understand the spirit of what you were trying to accomplish, and that you’re willing to adjust based on changes that might have been unpredictable. So when you’re actually looking at the contract, that’s a sign that the partnership isn’t going as well.”

That’s a brutal quote for Zaslav, who Silver is basically saying was trying to nickel and dime the NBA and ended up driving the league away from the negotiating table.

Of course, it’s worth noting that it’s the opposite narrative that WBD is trying to spin, especially in litigation with the various poison pills in the new NBA-Amazon contract that WBD could never realistically try to match. They also made a huge PR push in the wake of the NBA rights announcements against the NBA and Amazon specifically saying the deal was anti-consumer.

So where does the truth lie? As is usually the case, it’s probably somewhere in the middle. Silver certainly sees the bigger picture when it comes to the shifting tides of the media industry and that the future is not cable. And by partnering with ESPN, NBC, and Amazon, he gets the best of all worlds for the NBA. So TNT was likely facing an uphill battle to hold on to NBA rights from the very beginning. And by the end, the NBA clearly did not want to be in business with WBD because of the way it structured its Amazon deal to avoid incumbent matching rights.

However, Zaslav continually did WBD no favors in talks, especially when it came to his public comments about the company being able to afford seeing the NBA leave. And it seems like it was a similar story at the negotiating table. The hail mary lawsuit attempt seems like it’s more about saving face than actually maintaining NBA rights for TNT. And if anything, WBD is probably just as much at fault for losing the NBA is as the league is for seeking greener pastures.

[CNBC]