A new era in NBA broadcasting will become fully apparent this week as the beginning of the league’s postseason will be shown entirely on national networks—and to some extent exclusively on streaming platforms.
The NBA’s Play-In Tournament will start Tuesday and run through Friday, while the first round will follow starting on Saturday. The Play-In Tournament games will air exclusively on Amazon Prime Video, with that streaming presentation veering from the event’s prior coverage on ESPN and TNT Sports.
The first-round playoff matchups, meanwhile, will be divided among NBC, Peacock, Amazon, ESPN, and ABC. That, too, is a marked departure from prior years in which participating teams’ local rights holders frequently shared coverage with TNT, ESPN, ABC, and the league’s NBA TV—in turn giving in-market fans a choice of which broadcast to watch.
This new plan for the NBA’s broadcast schedule is a fundamental component of the league’s 11-year, $77 billion media rights contracts with Amazon, ESPN, and NBC Sports that went into effect this season. Even as this framework has been set and publicly known since July 2024, Sunday’s end of the 2025–26 regular season brought the structure into stark reality.
“This is the first time ever that no longer can the home team announcers and broadcasters televise the first round,” said Mike Breen, who has seen both sides of this dynamic as lead Knicks play-by-play announcer on MSG Networks, but also working the same role for the NBA on ESPN and ABC. “The entire playoffs [are] exclusive to the national TV partners. … I personally think it’s a poor decision. Fans want to hear their teams’ announcers, at least in the first round, because, for so many of us, they become part of the family, such a big part of why you root for the team.
“Now, I get it that the networks pay a fortune to get exclusivity. Obviously, I work for one of the networks, and it’s important to them. But I just think fans deserve to be thrown a bone once in a while,” Breen said during the Knicks’ regular-season finale Sunday, which was the final broadcast of the season for MSG Networks.
Main Street Demise
The increased focus on national networks during the forthcoming NBA postseason is also happening as Main Street Sports Group, parent company of the FanDuel Sports Network, is very likely approaching its final days.
Already, every MLB club previously aligned with Main Street Sports has cut ties, and several NHL teams in recent days have struck alternate broadcast deals in their home markets. The 13 NBA teams that have been with Main Street Sports are now set to become free agents for their local games beginning with the 2026–27 season this fall.
There will be a potentially messy process, however, for those teams to recoup at least some of the rights fees that Main Street Sports owed this year and hasn’t paid.
“FanDuel Sports Network has reached agreements with the NBA and NHL to broadcast games and other programming through the end of the 2026 NBA regular season and the end of the first round of the NHL playoffs,” Main Street Sports said earlier this month in a statement. “We are preparing to wind down our operations upon season’s end unless we reach a strategic transaction.”
The first round of the NHL playoffs will also start April 18 and runs through the duration of the month.
