The NBA has agreed to terms on a new media deal, an 11-year pact worth $76 billion that will ensure player salaries continue to rise for the foreseeable future and certainly change how viewers access the game for years to come.
A person familiar with the negotiations told The Associated Press that the networks have already received the term sheet and the next step is for the league's board of governors to approve the deal.
The person spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity Wednesday because he could not discuss such pressing issues.
The deal, which set an NBA record for both length and total value, goes into effect in the 2025-26 season. Games will continue to air on ESPN and ABC, with select games on NBC and Amazon Prime in the future. TNT Sports, part of the NBA broadcast family since the 1980s, may be leaving but still has five more days to match one of the deals.
The five-day countdown will begin once the league sends the completed contract to TNT.
The deal was first reported by The Athletic.
In the short term, the deal almost certainly means that the league's salary cap will rise 10% each year, a limit allowed by provisions of the latest collective bargaining agreement between the NBA and its players. That means players like Oklahoma City's Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Dallas' Luka Doncic could make around $80 million in 2030-31, and there's at least some chance that top players could be making closer to $100 million a season by the mid-2030s.
This would also pave the way for the NBA's next major agenda: expansion.
Commissioner Adam Silver has made his order of priorities very clear in recent seasons: maintain labor peace (achieved with a new collective bargaining agreement), reach a new media deal (now essentially complete), and only then will the league look to add new franchises. Las Vegas and Seattle are typically among the cities most often mentioned as expansion candidates, with other groups such as Montreal, Vancouver and Kansas City also expected to express interest.
As the total value of broadcast rights packages has increased over the past 25 years, so have salaries, depending on how much that revenue stream ultimately contributes to the salary cap.
When NBC and Turner agreed to a four-year, $2.6 billion deal beginning with the 1998-99 season, the salary cap was $30 million per team and the average salary was about $2.5 million. This season, the average salary is more than $10 million per player and will continue to rise.
When the NBC-Turner deal that began a quarter century ago expired, the next six seasons of the deal cost ABC, ESPN and Turner about $4.6 billion. The next deal, for seven years, will cost the networks $7.4 billion.
The current contract, which expires next season, shatters those records at about $24 billion over nine years.
And now it seems like pocket change.
The total price has risen by about 2,800% from the contract that began in 1998-99 to the one that now begins in 2025. If you take inflation into account between then and now, the value has increased by about 1,400%.
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AP Sports Writer Joe Reedy contributed from Los Angeles.
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AP NBA: https://apnews.com/hub/NBA
