Sports broadcaster Al Michaels in attendance with Warner Bros. chief executive officer David Zaslav Credit: Gary A. Vasquez-USA TODAY Sports

Your move, Zas.

In the ongoing soap opera that has been the NBA’s long-running media rights negotiations –arguably the most covered talks of its type ever–all eyes are on whether CEO David Zaslav will direct Warner Bros. Discovery to sue the NBA for spurning its media offer in favor of Amazon’s Prime Video.

“We have matched the Amazon offer, as we have a contractual right to do, and do not believe the NBA can reject it..and we will take appropriate action,” WBD’s TNT wrote in a statement, certainly raising the specter of a lawsuit.

A broadcaster of the NBA since 1989, Turner’s contract expires after next season. But its current contract gave it the option of matching an offer for the NBA’s rights. And that’s what WBD did Monday, choosing to match the lower-priced Prime package from the pricier NBC and ESPN deals the NBA announced today.

“We think they have grossly misinterpreted our contractual rights with respect to the 2025-26 season and beyond, and we will take appropriate action,” said TNT Sports in a response to the NBA’s dismissal of their claim. “We look forward, however, to another great season of the NBA on TNT and Max including our iconic Inside the NBA.”

Patrick Crakes, a former Fox Sports executive, said the NBA may have miscalculated WBD’s drive to keep the sport given its perceived rickety financial condition and the fact it has been adding new sports like college football and tennis that have been seen as a replacement for basketball.

“The NBA has kind of miscalculated the will of Zas,” Crakes said. “They thought he would continue to play by the rules of the game that everyone’s been playing by, which is, well, nothing like this happens, you know, ‘We don’t want to be partners with somebody who doesn’t want us.'”

Now, Turner could be broadcasting the NBA next season while suing the league, which would certainly be interesting fodder for the highly acclaimed studio show at TNT and TBS, Inside the NBA (lawyers will surely be all over Chuck, Ernie, Kenny, and Shaq to steer away from the subject).

Speaking before the NBA’s media deal announcement Wednesday, Robert Thompson, another former Fox Sports executive, wrote in a text, “It appears that the NBA is definitely tilted towards Amazon. My guess is that they have incorporated a variety of hurdles into the Amazon deal that will be difficult for WBD to match…the single most pertinent item which is WBD’s significantly smaller current distribution number compared to Prime.”

That’s a reference to WBD’s Max service, which has 100 million subs, compared to a projected 230 million for Prime. Those are global figures. In the U.S. Prime has about 170 million subs while the most recent public figures for Max were around 55 million subs in 2022.

Crakes says the comparison is overblown because so many of the Prime subs have it for shopping and not video.

“There’s this false belief that Amazon Prime is a TV universe. It is not,” he said. “It is a shopping universe that happens to have a companion video service.”

William Mao, senior vice president global media rights at Octagon, however, pointed to the tremendous viewership gains Amazon’s Thursday Night Football enjoyed last season, bringing it close to linear TV levels.

“And so I could see Amazon if it became a contentious back and forth around that (subscriber levels) being able to point to the fact that when they had a similar tier one property, that enjoyed a large (viewership) in the traditional space, they started to be able to get within the same ballpark on their platform,” Mao said. “This would suggest that there are at least sufficiently enough people using the service, particularly for live sports viewing to satisfy that concern for the NBA and probably why the NBA was willing to work with them on one of the packages.”

WBD reportedly took out a letter of credit to pay for the first three years in advance, a term in the Prime contract. Crakes argued this undercuts the narrative of WBD as a financially embattled company.

“They’re not getting that letter of credit because somebody thinks they aren’t going to pay it back,” he said. “So just keep that in mind the letter of credit didn’t drift into the air and help them. That’s a pretty serious thing.”

So is a broadcaster suing a league, especially one it’s in business with for at least one more year. That said, it’s hard to imagine the NBA would unveil its media deals if it isn’t confident it has the legal case buttoned up.

But Zas may beg to differ.

About Daniel Kaplan

Daniel Kaplan has been covering the business of sports for more than two decades. A proud founding reporter of SportsBusiness Journal, he spent the last four years at The Athletic.