The NBA is adding a dedicated local media executive to its league office for the first time.
Per Sports Business Journal, the league has created a new GM/Local Media position and hired Matt Volk to fill it. Volk, who most recently served as COO of NESN, starts June 22 and will oversee the NBA’s local media business for both NBA and WNBA teams.
Volk spent 15 years at ESPN in programming and acquisitions before stints at NBC Sports Washington and Audacy. He joined NESN in 2023 and served as a principal negotiator in the RSN’s acquisition of SportsNet Pittsburgh from Warner Bros. Discovery, and was a key figure in brokering the Penguins-Pirates partnership that kept SportsNet Pittsburgh alive as a two-team network following Diamond Sports Group’s bankruptcy.
The hire comes as the league is still sorting out the fallout from the collapse of Main Street Sports Group, the parent company of the FanDuel Sports Networks, which left 13 NBA teams — the Hawks, Hornets, Cavaliers, Pistons, Pacers, Clippers, Grizzlies, Heat, Bucks, Timberwolves, Thunder, Magic, and Spurs — without a local broadcast home heading into 2026-27. Main Street had been missing monthly rights payments to most of its associated teams for much of the season before going under, and the financial damage was significant enough that the league lowered its salary cap projection for next season by $1 million, directly attributing the reduction to declining local media revenue.
With nearly half the league in flux, the NBA has been in talks with YouTube TV, Prime Video, ESPN, and DAZN about launching a centralized local streaming platform. All signs point to a 2027-28 launch for that platform, though some teams — the Pistons, for instance — have already been striking their own individual deals with local over-the-air affiliates and streamers in the interim.
Volk will presumably be coordinating a lot of that going forward.
About Sam Neumann
Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.