Over the past few weeks, the NBA media rights saga has become the biggest story in sports media.
ESPN and the NBA agreed to extend their deal fairly early in the process and without much hesitation from either side.
The same, however, can’t be said for the NBA’s deal with Warner Brothers Discovery. In fact, it’s looking increasingly likely that the longtime partnership between the two sides will be coming to an end.
With the exclusive negotiating window being in the past, many have asked about WBD’s reported matching rights to any deal, such as the ones recently submitted by Amazon and NBC The idea was that WBD could just match the offers, but there have been disagreements between the media company and the NBA about what that entails.
Former ESPN president John Skipper, who oversaw multiple extensions to the ESPN/NBA deal has his doubts that the matching rights ever existed in the first place.
“I am puzzled and don’t understand how they could have a right to match, and I really have a hard time understanding how they could have a right to match Amazon because that is not even the same package,” Skipper said, via Barrett Sports Media on The Sporting Class podcast.
“You get a right to renegotiate your own package – an exclusive negotiating window. I never had much luck getting a match right because that dramatically decreases the rightsholders’ chances to get the most money, so I’m puzzled, and I do not believe we had that right,” Skipper added before tacking on, “I don’t believe TNT has that right.”
With one year remaining on the deal, seeing what happens next in this saga will be interesting.
[Barrett Sports Media]
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