Afternoon Edition |
October 21, 2025 |
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The NBA’s $77 billion future starts tonight with fresh broadcast partners, injured stars, and plenty of questions about how fans will actually find their favorite games.
—Colin Salao, Eric Fisher, and Margaret Fleming
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The 2025–26 NBA season is here.
While the league’s core has stayed intact, the season brings in new changes stemming from a new media deal, major ownership changes, and a looming salary-cap circumvention scandal.
Front Office Sports looks at the biggest storylines ahead of the 2025–26 NBA season.
Broadcast Fragmentation
The most notable change will be the NBA’s new, 11-year, $77 billion media deal. The NBA brought back ESPN as a partner, while replacing Warner Bros. Discovery with NBC and Amazon.
The additional partners turned into an increase in national games—75 more than last year—as the league welcomed streaming on NBC’s Peacock and Amazon’s Prime Video. However, this could also be a more expensive and confusing season for the avid NBA fan, given the rotating broadcasters.
The NBA seems aware of the issue, as the NBA Communications X account constantly pushes its daily watch guide. The league also launched a “Tap to Watch” initiative that directs fans to the broadcasters of each game, whether on national or local platforms. The initiative can be found on the NBA app, team websites, and on NBA social media.
NBA commissioner Adam Silver addressed the issue at the Front Office Sports Tuned In summit last month, acknowledging that he thinks there will be “disruption” for NBA fans.
“I recognize that I’m going to be sitting on some stage a few months from now, and people are going to be complaining that you have three partners now and it’s hard to find the games. So the NBA app is going to be a front door to all those services. … And over time, technology will make this easier,” Silver said.
New Owners, Increased Valuations
This season will be the first year that two of the league’s historic franchises will be under new majority ownership.
The Celtics were sold for $6.1 billion to an ownership group led by Bill Chisolm, a transaction finalized in August. The sale pinned Boston as the most valuable NBA franchise, only to be leapfrogged by the Lakers, its longtime rival, when minority owner Mark Walter purchased a majority stake at a $10 billion valuation.
The sale was a record high for all professional sports franchises.
Amid the finalization of the sale, the Celtics were one of the most active franchises in the offseason, shedding more than $250 million in projected salary and tax payments by trading away several key players like Kristaps Porziņģis and Jrue Holiday.
The Lakers were one of the quieter teams in the offseason, but it remains to be seen how the leadership of Walter, who owns MLB’s Dodgers, the league’s highest spender, will impact how they spend throughout the season.
Clippers Fiasco Fallout
The most prominent story of the NBA offseason still does not have a resolution, hours away from tip-off.
On Sept. 3, sports journalist Pablo Torre reported that Clippers star Kawhi Leonard received $28 million for a “no-show” job from Aspiration, a now-bankrupt financial services company. The contract was allegedly meant to help Los Angeles circumvent the NBA’s salary cap.
There have been several more reports since the initial allegation, including the Boston Sports Journal reporting an additional $20 million deal between Leonard and Aspiration.
The NBA announced shortly after Torre’s report that they had launched an investigation. Silver said at the Tuned In summit that the league “will get to the bottom of this,” but the league has said little over the last month.
Leonard will start the season as a member of the Clippers, and Steve Ballmer has free rein to watch his beloved team at the Intuit Dome. However, all eyes will be on the Clippers, and whatever punishment, if any, will be handed to them as they host the 2026 All-Star Game in February.
For more on the biggest storylines shaping the NBA’s new season—from ownership shake-ups to injured stars—read Colin Salao’s full story here.
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The “for sale” sign is now officially posted for TNT Sports parent company Warner Bros. Discovery.
After weeks of rising speculation and an inbound offer from David Ellison, CEO of CBS Sports parent Paramount Skydance, WBD said Tuesday morning that it has begun a “review of strategic alternatives to maximize shareholder value.” The company said the move was driven by “unsolicited interest” from “multiple parties,” without specifically naming Ellison or anyone else.
“It’s no surprise that the significant value of our portfolio is receiving increased recognition by others in the market,” WBD CEO David Zaslav said in a statement.
NBC Sports parent Comcast and Netflix are also reportedly interested in acquiring at least part of WBD. In each of those instances, as well as Paramount, the resulting combination would create a sports media colossus with extensions in nearly every North American pro sport. Netflix co-CEO Greg Peters, however, said at a Bloomberg conference last week that “we come from a deep heritage of being builders rather than buyers.”
WBD’s move arrived not long after it detailed a plan to split into two independent, publicly traded companies. The majority of the sports assets will reside in a forthcoming Discovery Global, to the point where a new streaming service for that programming is being developed.
Any purchase offer, as a result, will need to beat the upside of that separation.
“We continue to believe that our planned separation to create two distinct, leading media companies will create compelling value,” said WBD board chair Samuel A. Di Piazza Jr. “That said, we determined taking these actions to broaden our scope is in the best interest of shareholders.”
Market Dynamics
There is no timetable for the strategic review process. The WBD separation, however, is targeted for completion by mid-2026, meaning that some type of path could become clear by the spring.
WBD is currently trading at around $20 per share, with early Tuesday activity sending the stock up by nearly 10%. That price was the prior reported offer from Ellison, when the stock previously traded at about $18 per share, meaning that there was minimal premium before, and none now.
Initiating the formal process could elevate the offers significantly beyond that range, but it will bear watching if other inquiries are for all of WBD, as was Ellison’s bid, or for just parts of the company. An Ellison bid, however, could still be the most compelling, and not just because of the greater likelihood of regulatory approval compared to one from Comcast.
“Putting Paramount together with Warner Bros. Discovery sounds compelling,” LightShed Partners wrote in a research note. “Gut the cost structure of the combined company, cherry-pick the best film, TV, and streaming projects, dramatically increase the breadth and depth of library titles, while writing off a ton of weaker projects, and combine streaming platforms and leverage greater scale and sports rights to slow the decline of the combined company’s linear TV portfolio.”
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Dan Hamilton-Imagn Images
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Monday’s outage of Amazon Web Services—the cloud computing service that powers many major websites and apps—caused disruptions for a wide range of companies, from United Airlines and Fortnite to Amazon’s own website.
The sports world was not immune. The widespread outage, caused by an error contained in an early morning software update to AWS’s DynamoDB database service, persisted from around 3 a.m. Eastern Monday into Tuesday.
Ticketmaster had issues ahead of several big games Monday night. The Blue Jays, ahead of hosting the Mariners in Game 7 of the ALCS, posted a notice about the issue to fans on social media and encouraged them to “hold off on managing your tickets as we work through this.” The Blue Jays later posted that the system was returning to normal, but they would place additional staff at entry gates to help with any ticket issues.
NFL fans also had trouble accessing tickets ahead of Monday’s doubleheader. In Detroit, a Lions spokesperson said the “ticketing thing is being worked on” as Ticketmaster glitched ahead of Monday Night Football. In Seattle, the Seahawks acknowledged the outage and told fans: “Please be assured that you and your guests will be able to successfully enter the game tonight.”
Sports betting apps, including FanDuel, DraftKings, and Fanatics Sportsbook, all had problems and alerted users on social media. “Please note that some withdrawals are still slow to process due to the outage overnight,” DraftKings posted. FanDuel posted updates as service was restored in certain areas, with New York, Puerto Rico, and Connecticut being the last shortly before midnight ET.
In the U.K., the Premier League announced it would start the Brentford–West Ham match without semi-automated offside technology, which uses cameras and artificial intelligence to track whether a player was offside. The change led to a longer-than-usual manual review for a goal that was ruled offside in the first half, but the technology was restored for the second half. Fellow EPL team Tottenham Hotspur postponed ticket sales for upcoming home games due to the disruption.
The popular fitness app Strava went down, briefly stopping users from logging and sharing their workouts until a little past noon ET. Strava’s website says it has more than 150 million users worldwide who share 51 million updates per week.
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The World Series is set, with the Dodgers heading to Toronto for Game 1 against the Blue Jays. This series will bring out international audiences from both Japan and Canada, which FOS newsletter writer Eric Fisher sees as a big positive for MLB. He joins to talk through the intrigue around this heavy-hitting matchup and give his prediction.
Plus, the NBA season tips off tonight on NBC, one of two new partners under the new media-rights deal worth $76 billion. FOS reporter Colin Salao tells Baker Machado and Renee Washington which storylines he’s watching most closely this year, including the fragmentation of media rights and the ongoing Clippers scandal ahead of their first time hosting the All-Star Game.
Also, Lakers reporter Yaron Weitzman talks us through discoveries from his new book, A Hollywood Ending: The Dreams and Drama of the LeBron Lakers, that details everything from Russell Westbrook’s beef with LeBron to the draft process around Bronny James.
Watch the full episode here.
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College Football Playoff ⬆⬇ This season’s selection committee will be made up of 12 people, one less than usual, after former Arizona State offensive lineman Randall McDaniel stepped down due to personal reasons. The CFP announced the news Monday, and that McDaniel will return to the committee next season. The first 2025 CFP rankings will be released Nov. 4.
Good Good Golf ⬆ The YouTube golf influencer group is heading up a new PGA Tour event that will debut in Austin in November 2026: The Good Good Championship at Omni Barton Creek Resort & Spa. Good Good Golf, which launched in 2020, received a $45 million funding round earlier this year.
Broadcast TV ⬆ Viewership on over-the-air networks in the U.S. surged by 20% in September compared to August, according to the newly released version of The Gauge, Nielsen’s monthly report of TV and streaming consumption. The increase was largely attributable to the start of college and pro football seasons, and sports amounted to a third of all broadcast TV viewership during the month, triple the 11% from August. Streaming continued to dominate overall consumption among U.S. viewers, however, again beating the combined total from cable and broadcast TV.
NBA globalization ⬆ As the league hits opening night of the 2025–26 season Tuesday, the league has a record 135 players from a record-tying 43 countries on the initial rosters. That non-U.S. player base, spanning six continents, includes an unprecedented 71 Europeans, with 19 of them hailing from France.
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