North America’s National Basketball Association has filed a motion for dismissal in the New York Supreme Court over the lawsuit filed against it by the Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) media giant.
WBD filed the lawsuit back in July, alleging that the NBA had breached its contract with the broadcaster after the top US basketball league rejected its matching bid for domestic media rights in the next cycle.
The media giant initiated legal action two days after the NBA signed a new 11-year media rights deal worth around $76 billion with Disney, NBC, and Amazon Prime Video that runs from the 2025-26 season through 2035-36.
WBD claimed to have exercised the matching clause in its existing NBA contract to compete with Amazon’s $1.8 billion offer, but the NBA confirmed it had rejected the last-minute bid as it did not match the terms of the retail giant’s proposal.
Now, the NBA has filed for the suit’s dismissal, itself alleging that WBD did not match the terms of NBCUniversal’s more expensive linear TV offer, but rather Amazon’s cheaper, strictly OTT, offer, but then rewrote the terms of said offer to include linear rights alongside other “substantive” changes.
It was these sweeping changes that the NBA stated gave the league ample reason to deny the bid altogether, with the league having as such requested the New York Supreme Court scrap the suit.
In the initial 29-page complaint, WBD argued that its contractual rights should apply to the package of games Amazon was awarded, since the games were previously part of a package distributed on cable.
WBD said in the filing: “That is exactly what happened here: Amazon made an offer for cable rights as defined in the [matching rights exhibit], and TBS [Turner Broadcasting System] matched it. But, in breach of the agreement, the NBA has refused to honor TBS’s match. The NBA had no right not to honor TBS’s match.”
In a copy of the redacted complaint obtained by ESPN, WBD cited language in the matching rights agreement of its contract with the NBA from 2014, when the league entered into a nine-year, $24-billion media rights deal with ESPN and Turner that will expire after the upcoming 2024-25 season.
Specifically, WBD referred to terms in that contract that stated that the NBA may “not enter into an agreement or agreements with any third party or parties” regarding future NBA broadcast rights “without first giving” Turner Broadcasting System a chance to accept it.
The NBA has, however said that the 2014 agreement should also be discarded as an argument as at the time WBD was not party to the agreement, having only purchased Turner Broadcasting System in 2022, and under New York law that can serve as grounds for dismissal.
A deadline of September 20 for WBD to file a response to the NBA has been set.
