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How Zaz Lost the NBA

The inside story of testy dealmaking and re-trading: the missed signals, the Spulu trigger, the Zaz-Silberwasser good-cop-bad-cop routine, and all the slights that now point to a litigious endgame.

nba tnt reggie miller ian eagle
Sure, TNT had been carrying league games for decades, but the network had also transitioned during that time from Turner Entertainment to Time Warner to WarnerMedia, and now WBD. Photo: Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images
John Ourand
July 26, 2024

Around 4 p.m. on Wednesday, the NBA’s media and distribution executive Bill Koenig emailed Warner Bros. Discovery’s Luis Silberwasser to explain exactly why the league wouldn’t allow WBD to use its matching rights for a package of league games that Amazon had successfully bid on. Presumably, of course, WBD C.E.O. David Zaslav and his attorneys were fully prepared for this eventuality. A half-hour later, as the NBA sent out a statement announcing its $77 billion worth of new, 11-year media deals with ESPN, NBCUniversal, and Amazon, WBD’s lawyers were already drafting the lawsuit that the company plans to file against the league, possibly as soon as tomorrow.