Throughout the New York Knicks playoff series against the Indiana Pacers, Warner Bros. Discovery president and chief executive officer David Zaslav has been seen sitting courtside at Madison Square Garden with a Knicks hat on watching the game. Zaslav and the company are reportedly in negotiations to try and retain media rights to the NBA, with whom the Turner Broadcasting entity has done business since 1984. Yet subsequent reports have stated that the likely outcome is in Comcast’s NBCUniversal receiving the final rights package, thus granting them NBA rights for the first time since 2002 and presumably shutting Warner Bros. Discovery and TNT Sports out. NBCUniversal was reportedly preparing a bid of $2.5 billion for rights to the NBA, according to The Wall Street Journal.

There has been discussion, however, as to whether or not Warner Bros. Discovery has the right to match a competing offer and if it would do so with NBCUniversal or potentially Amazon, which reportedly has the framework for a streaming package for $1.8 billion annually.

John Skipper, who was the president of ESPN at the time the company signed its existing nine-year media rights deal with the NBA, recalled that the two media rights deals the league signed were quite similar. He does not believe that it had the right to match, however, which led to subsequent discussion on the latest edition of The Sporting Class because of the ambiguity and intrigue surrounding the Warner Bros. Discovery contract. The Walt Disney Company (ESPN/ABC) has also reportedly reached a framework for a media rights package for approximately $2.6 billion a year, which would include keeping the NBA Finals on its networks.

“I am puzzled and don’t understand how they could have a right to match, and I really have a hard time understanding how they could have a right to match Amazon because that is not even the same package,” Skipper said. “You get a right to renegotiate your own package – an exclusive negotiating window. I never had much luck getting a match right because that dramatically decreases the rightsholders’ chances to get the most money, so I’m puzzled, and I do not believe we had that right.

“I do not believe TNT had that right, which would mean that subsequently somehow when there was this consolidation of these assets into Warner Bros. Discovery, they got the NBA to agree to let them have a matching right.”

Meadowlark Media personality and former Miami Marlins team president David Samson was seen on camera ostensibly mouthing the word ‘Wow’ as Skipper provided this explanation. After Skipper concluded, he said that the people in the booth would know which part of the show to clip because of what was said. Samson referred to Skipper stating that Warner Bros. Discovery had been lying for the last two months, an accusation he refuted. Instead, Skipper articulated that he was stating what he knew to his knowledge.

“It’s not for me to accuse anybody of mendacity, but I am puzzled by it,” Skipper said, referring to Warner Bros. Discovery and TNT Sports.

“Puzzled because you have signed a deal that is supposed to be quite similar to the deal that they are also working with and doesn’t have the thing that they say that they have?,” Samson questioned.

“I can’t be privy or read anybody’s mind as of what may have happened subsequent to those signatures,” Skipper replied.

During the Warner Bros. Discovery Upfront on Wednesday in New York City, TNT Sports division chairman and chief executive officer Luis Silberwasser addressed the situation surrounding the NBA. Within his remarks, he stated that the company was looking forward to another season and reaching a deal that makes sense for all of the parties. Both Warner Bros. Discovery and The Walt Disney Company have one year remaining on their existing NBA contracts, which expire at the end of the 2024-25 season.

“They will do ad business in the next year,” Skipper said of the message at the Upfront, “and they’re just reminding the advertisers in the audience not to change their budgets yet.”

Ahead of the 2024 National Football League season, CBS Sports made changes to its longtime studio program, The NFL Today, moving on from longtime analysts and former NFL quarterbacks Boomer Esiason and Phil Simms. The network added former NFL quarterback Matt Ryan to the panel, who served as a color commentator for NFL on CBS games, ahead of the show’s 50th year on the air. Ryan will join analysts Bill Cowher, Nate Burleson and J.J. Watt on the show next season, along with host James Brown. Next week, Brown will be honored with the Lifetime Achievement Award from The National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences at the 45th Sports Emmy Awards.

Before receiving the honor, Brown joined the Sports Business Radio Podcast where he was asked about the new cast of The NFL Today. Brown has been working as the host of the show since 2006 and has helped the show continue to retain a level of prosperity and respect in the sports media space. He is widely regarded as one of the most skilled studio hosts in the industry and demonstrates a selflessness on the air with an aptitude to set up his colleagues for success.

“It’s a family, and I would be disingenuous if I said that there wasn’t some disappointment because they’ve been family for decades; literally just about decades,” Brown said regarding Esiason and Simms. “Boomer and I have worked together for a long period of time. They’re hard-working guys.”

Brown remarked that Simms is the hardest-working person in media and someone who knows the game, classifying him as a “gym rat” in that he continues to hone his craft at a high level. Additionally, he stated that Esiason covers a wide range of sports and that his work in media is “his life” and something that he loves to do.

“There’s some sadness there because they were teammates, but we’re also big boys,” Brown said. “We all played sports – they have longer than me – and we understand that it’s part of the business.”

While Brown is doleful to see Esiason and Simms leave the show, he is already laying the groundwork to make sure that Ryan will be able to successfully assimilate into the program. During his podcast appearance, he revealed that he reached out to Ryan and affirmed that he would be embraced and welcomed onto the show. This aligns with what Brown did for Watt last year, who he explained has a self-assurance because he is someone who was a star player and someone who has a genuine adoration for the sport.

“We bring in a couple of guys who are pined for success, and we just want to make sure that the transition is as seamless and as quick as possible by having meetings [and] getting to know each other,” Brown said. “Nothing beats getting to know each other, breaking bread and learning about your colleague so that you’ll know how best to play off of and to set them up.”

Earlier in the podcast, Brown elucidated that his colleagues know an immense amount about football, contextualizing it by averring that they will forget more football than he will ever know. Throughout the week, he will proffer ideas and storylines by them to gain their opinion on the matter and position them to thrive come Sunday. Brown has observed people in his position try to portray themselves as shrewder than they actually are, specifically pertaining to football nuances and information, but he understands that the job is about his colleagues rather than himself.

“In the world of 24/7 sports, there’s nothing new by the time we get to Sunday,” Brown said. “What’s going to be more important is the opinion, the insight, the information that our analysts, our co-hosts deliver, so therefore I want to make certain that I am well prepared to ask the most relevant and pertinent questions of them, and coming off of conversations with them during the course of the week, I know where they’re going, so my job is to ask.”

The NBA media rights is one of the hot topics in sports talk these days with the future of Inside the NBA being one of the most talked about points of the discussion. Bomani Jones and Domonique Foxworth talked about it on the latest edition of The Right Time with Bomani Jones.

“It doesn’t seem to be official, but we are starting to get the word leaking out that it is possible that Inside the NBA, it might be a wrap on that,” Jones said. “…I don’t fully understand how the money works…but dude this would stink.

“The question is, does Charles come to wherever it is? Because Charles is the engine that makes this thing go. Every broadcasting operation has a personality to it and NBC’s personality is 100% the opposite of Charles Barkley.

Jones and Foxworth talked about what happens if TNT does lose the NBA and Ernie Johnson stays at TNT, does the show work on another network.

“I think the show can exist as it does because of a fairly unique set of conditions and circumstances, but this is the one that I think that gets lost,” he said. “TNT is on cable, for a channel that itself I would argue doesn’t really have a brand/personality…I don’t think of TNT as having a clear, distinct personality… What Inside the NBA became, and when it is really cash money is postgame in the playoffs, that’s when you get your money’s worth out of that show. At which point, it is a late-night show on cable television, which allows you to do a lot more. It allows them to be a lot more loosey-goosey or they can just decide they are going to ignore whatever the games were and talk about everything else…you can do that late night on cable television in a way that I don’t know if you can working for the Tiffany network.”

Jones brought up the time the show talked more about what happened with George Floyd in Minneapolis versus talking about that evening’s basketball games. “You think NBC got the stomach for that, because I don’t,” Jones said to Foxworth.

Jones later added, “I am not sure how many people are willing to do what TNT did, which is to say, ‘we are going to let Charles Barkley steer the ship and we are just going to cross our fingers and hope that nobody notices some of the things that he says.’ You think he can get over on NBC or even on Amazon talking about them big women in San Antonio?

“NBC was a great broadcast partner for the NBA in that era of the world and that era of broadcasting. To me the personality of the NBA is much more of an outlaw-ish, loosey-goosey, counter-cultural sort of thing, which is just the exact opposite of NBC and what they broadcast.”