The NBA asked the New York Supreme Court to dunk on a lawsuit filed by Warner Bros. Discovery.
It’s the latest twist in the media rights saga that will result in the end of a 39-year partnership between the league and Turner, which aired games on TBS and TNT.
The NBA reportedly filed a motion late Friday asking for the dismissal with prejudice of a July 26 lawsuit. That means the lawsuit could not be brought again in the future.
Two days after the NBA signed an 11-year, $76 billion contract with Disney (parent company ESPN), NBC and Amazon, Warner Bros. Discovery (parent company of Turner) alleged that the league breached its contract by rejecting a matching offer and brought its games to Amazon instead.
The NBA’s stance is that Warner Bros. Discovery wanted to rewrite the terms in eight of the 27 sections of Amazon’s offer– worth about $1.8 billion per year – and match the revised agreement.
Not apples-to-apples, which left the NBA free to reject the match under its contract.
“TBS chose not to match NBCUniversal’s offer, which would have enabled TBS to continue distributing games via its TNT linear cable network,” the league wrote, according to an ESPN report. “Instead, TBS purported to match the less-expensive Amazon offer, but only after revising it to include traditional distribution rights and making numerous other substantive changes.”
The NBA argues that Warner Bros. Discovery’s method of distribution – linear television – means it should have matched NBC’s offer of $2.45 billion per year and not the cheaper of the three offers, which Amazon made for streaming distribution.