The question at the center of the NBA’s current media rights negotiations concerns the extent of Warner Bros. Discovery’s ability to match third party bids by Comcast and Amazon. WBD is said to believe that it can match on price alone and that it can match either Comcast or Amazon. The NBA is said to believe that a match must consist of similar platform offerings, which in the case of Comcast would include a broadcast network. If WBD seeks to push the issue, it could sue and leave the matter to be decided by the courts.
As is so often the case, past is prologue. Turn back the clock 50 years and the NBA had a similar conflict that ultimately damaged the league in ways that it took Magic, Bird and Jordan to eventually fix.
When ABC took over from NBC as the NBA’s over-the-air home in 2002, it was not the network’s first stint with the league. Just 29 years earlier — 1995 in 2024 terms — ABC carried its last NBA Finals as the Knicks defeated the Lakers in 1973. The partnership ended acrimoniously and, for the NBA, self-destructively.
By 1973, the NBA had been with ABC for nine years. In those days, partnering with ABC meant aligning oneself with the sports television network of record and the industry’s preeminent visionary Roone Arledge, who by that point was a proven hitmaker with “Monday Night Football” and “Wide World of Sports.” Arledge, as described by the famed author David Halberstam, was “artist enough to understand and catch the artistry of the game” and worked to convey the league’s intangible qualities to the television audience. He had done it before. Arledge, Halberstam wrote in his classic The Breaks of the Game, “had been successful because he knew how to focus on the special beauty and rhythm of a given sport and, through the magic of his cameras, virtually invent a national constituency for it.”
Considering what came before, when sports television was a spartan, barebones affair, Arledge was a veritable revolutionary and is still considered the forefather of modern day sportscasting.
Arledge offered a four-year extension and modest rights fee increase when negotiations began in 1972 and believed he had a deal. Yet NBA owners of the era were particularly short-sighted. The owners — whom Arledge regarded as “the most selfish and egocentric he had ever dealt with,” per Halberstam — were particularly contemptuous of television, which they recognized as a necessity and yet held at arm’s length.
As chronicled in The Breaks of the Game, recent books The Cap by Joshua Mendelsohn and From Hang Time to Primetime by Pete Croatto, and any number of other accounts in between, the owners were unsatisfied with the ABC partnership, as they believed it threatened their ability to make money distributing their games as they saw fit. Lakers owner Jack Kent Cooke was particularly upset about the number of Laker games being set aside for ABC.
Cooke and two other big-market owners, Frank Mieuli of the Golden State Warriors and Ned Irish of the New York Knicks, sought to torpedo the ABC deal, using the rationale that the league needed to be on television from the beginning of the season and — more to the point for the owners — that the broadcasts needed to be blacked out in home markets in order to protect local rights.
As ABC had the ability to match any deal the NBA would reach with a third party, an agreement with a new network would have to be structured in such a way to make matching impossible. Thus, the dissenting faction cooked up a rights deal that would require weekly Saturday afternoon games from October through December — the middle of ABC’s college football season — to take priority over all of the network’s other sports programming, knowing that ABC would not skip college football games to carry the lower-rated NBA. CBS, in need of programming, was amenable and made a three-year bid worth slightly more annually than what ABC was offering.
Upon being presented with the poison pill CBS offer, Arledge sought first to sweeten ABC’s bid by including primetime games and then to extend the deadline for negotiating, but was rebuffed both times, per Mendelsohn. He then resorted to the courts, as ABC filed a lawsuit seeking to block the CBS deal — alleging that it was not negotiated in good faith.
Once legal remedies were exhausted to no avail, allowing the CBS deal to go through, Arledge went on the proverbial warpath. Trouncing the NBA’s new Saturday afternoon games on CBS was simple enough, as those games only existed to push ABC out of the picture. (Neither CBS nor the NBA were enthusiastic about the Saturday games, per Mendelsohn.) Arledge was not satisfied and sought to crush the NBA on Sunday afternoons as well with a new competition series “SuperStars” and a Sunday edition of “Wide World of Sports.” It worked. “After all the contract chicanery that led to a desired deal,” Croatto wrote, “NBA games were getting slaughtered by Rod Laver and Joe Frazier running the 100-yard dash.”
Between what came to be known as “Roone’s Revenge” and a lukewarm partner in CBS — which ended up carrying the NBA for 17 years but did not fully commit to the league until nearly the end of its run — the NBA struggled on television for years afterward. Within a decade, NBA Finals games were airing on tape delay.
“We had first rights to the NBA but they structured it in a way we couldn’t accept,” ABC Sports executive Jim Spence recalled to the AP in 1979, near the nadir of the NBA’s popularity. “The NBA chose to leave us, they screwed us. But it’s probably the best thing that ever happened to us.” (Spence, per author Travis Vogan, negotiated a deal to bring the NBA back to ABC less than a decade later, but it was rejected by ABC’s then-parent company Capital Cities.)
Is there a lesson in the 1970s case for the present-day NBA? Not necessarily. There is little David Zaslav can do to make the NBA pay in the way that Roone Arledge did 50 years ago. The present-day NBA is infinitely more established and the future of WBD is uncertain. Far from the short-sighted decision-making of Jack Kent Cooke, the league today is seeking to shore itself up for what figures to be a volatile decade ahead in the media industry. Its motivations in this negotiation are to strengthen its partnerships to include some of the most durable media companies in the world, and correspondingly, to leave a company in WBD that has changed hands numerous times in recent years and figures to do so again in the near future.
The lesson here may be for the networks. Fifty years ago and again today, matching rights are simply no match for a league’s desired outcome.
