Three different media companies won new 11-year rights deals with the NBA on Wednesday. only one of them is going to radically rework its business to accommodate the new agreement.
NBCUniversal will, starting in late 2025, devote three full nights a week to NBA play during the league’s season, two of them on the NBC broadcast network and one of them on its Peacock streaming hub.
“I think it’s an opportunity,” says Rick Cordella, president of NBC Sports, during an interview .Indeed, in an era when big audiences have grown more difficult to accumulate, NBCUniversal and its parent, Comcast, couldn’t ignore the chance to get involved with Big Basketball. NBCU is believed to be spending an estimated $2.5 billion a year on a deal that gives it the chance to air 100 regular-season games; the NBA All-Star Game; and a passel of exclusive first-round playoff games. In a sign of how much NBC wanted this sports deal, the company is paying more for NBA games than it is for its current NFL package, according to estimates from the independent analysis firm MoffettNathanson.
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Still, for NBC, this is no slam dunk.
There’s never a guarantee that any sport will continue to captivate an audience, and NBC hasn’t had much reason to reach basketball fans since it lost the rights package it had in 2002. To bring in the NBA, NBC will have to cut back on the dramas, comedies and reality programs it puts on its broadcast schedule, which will now be devoted to “Sunday Night Basketball” following the end of the NFL season, and a unique doubleheader each Tuesday night. NBC will broadcast an 8 p.m. eastern game on stations in the Eastern and Central time zones and a later game on stations in the Mountain and Pacific time zones. Peacock will stream both games live, and also stream games on Monday nights.
“It’s a bet for us,” says Cordella, but executives believe the games will serve as great promotional vehicles for NBC’s entertainment fare and news programming. They point to the decision to stream an extra NFL Wild Card game on Peacock in the most recent season as a catalyst for subscriptions to the hub and a spur for more tine spent by users watching other offerings. Still, he notes, “our strategy is not to be all sports,” but to invest in sports properties that can help buoy other programming.
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NBC Sports is likely to air a one-hour pre-game show on Sunday nights, says Cordella. And while it’s easy to guess that it might take the form of “Football Night in America,” the lead-in to “Sunday Night Football” that is one of the nation’s most-watched programs, the executive says that no talent plans are finalized.
Mike Tirico and Noah Eagle have long been viewed as top play-by-play candidates for basketball, but Cordella declined to comment on any candidates that might be under consideration — or if NBC might try to woo members of the “Inside the NBA” team from Warner Bros. Discovery’s TNT. That long-running and popular show faces cancellation unless that company can claw back some rights it believes it is owed. The NBA on Wednesday also struck deals with Amazon and Disney, and rejected a bid by Warner to try and snatch away the pact tied to Amazon.
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This is NBC Sports’ biggest deal under Cordella, who was named president of the unit in 2023 after logging a stint at Peacock, which he helped launch. As the current NBA deal neared its end, and with the league deciding to entertain pitches from outsiders after not coming to terms with Warner during a mandated window for renewal, NBC felt “this was not something that comes to market every year,” says Cordella.
Now all the company has to do is prove to the basketball league that it needs to keep the games at NBC beyond the next decade.
