The 2025–26 NBA regular-season schedule is out, officially solidifying the league’s embrace of streaming services.

The NBA announced 247 national games for the upcoming season, up from 172 last year (a 43.6% increase) as the league begins its 11-year, $77 billion media deal with ESPN, NBC, and Amazon Prime Video. The national games are those that air to all customers on either linear television (ABC, ESPN, NBC) or streaming services (Peacock, Amazon Prime Video, ESPN).

The league says every national game will be available on at least one national streaming service.

The season starts Oct. 21 with a doubleheader on NBC and Peacock, the first NBA games on NBC in more than two decades. The first game will be the Rockets visiting the Thunder, followed by the Lakers hosting the Warriors.

The first exclusively streamed NBA games will come just three days later with a Celtics-Knicks and Timberwolves-Lakers doubleheader on Amazon Prime Video. 

The first Peacock NBA Monday games will be Oct. 27 as the Cavaliers face the Pistons and the Nuggets play the Timberwolves.

The NBA’s season-long national schedule will feature games on Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Once the middle of the season hits—and football season winds down—the NBA will have national games every day of the week.

• Monday: Peacock
• Tuesday: NBC, Peacock
• Wednesday: ESPN
• Thursday: Amazon Prime Video
• Friday: Amazon Prime Video, ESPN
• Saturday: Amazon Prime Video, ABC
• Sunday: ABC, NBC, Peacock

This season, NBC will debut Sunday Night Basketball, akin to its Sunday Night Football coverage during the NFL season. The first Sunday Night Basketball will be Feb. 1. 

Top National Teams

Four teams are tied at 34 for the most national games: the Knicks, Lakers, Thunder, and Warriors. The choices are not surprising, as Oklahoma City is coming off a championship run while the other three are big-market franchises that made the playoffs last year.

Golden State and Los Angeles are still considered the two biggest draws in the league—and their Christmas matchup last year was the most-watched regular-season game in half a decade.

The new-look Rockets—who added Kevin Durant after finishing second in the West last year—are next with 28 games, tied with the Anthony Edwards–led Timberwolves. The Spurs and Victor Wembanyama just missed the top 10 with 22 national games.

Every NBA team will have at least two national appearances this season. Each team had at least one when the schedule was announced last year, but not all finished with a national game. The Wizards, for example, had their one game on TNT replaced by a matchup between the Cavs and Thunder.

Another major NFL venue is retiring its public debt many years ahead of schedule.

The city of Arlington, Texas, which owns AT&T Stadium, the home of the Cowboys, said it will make a final, $22.6 million payment Friday on the 16-year-old venue, ending the facility debt a decade early. 

Arlington was originally scheduled to pay down $325 million in total contributions until 2035. Revenues from a sales-tax increase, hotel occupancy taxes, and car-rental taxes—all approved by local voters in 2004 to help fund the stadium—enabled the debt to be settled far sooner. 

Overall, Arlington paid $490.3 million in total principal, interest, and fees toward AT&T Stadium, but getting so far ahead of schedule saved more than $150 million in additional interest and fees. The Jerry Jones–led Cowboys paid the rest of the $1.2 billion in total construction costs for AT&T Stadium. 

“Ten years early saves you a lot of interest and a lot of fees,” Arlington city manager Trey Yelverton told the city council. “Because of how we’ve structured things, we’re able to pay them off early, and because we’re paying this one off early, we continue to be in a good position for Globe Life Field.”

Arlington is also on the hook for $500 million in costs, before interest and fees, for the home ballpark of MLB’s Rangers. That, too, is on track for early repayment, with Yelverton projecting a 2034 retirement of that debt, 14 years early.

More Early Repayment

The Texas situation also mirrors other, newer NFL stadiums that have similarly paid down debt far ahead of the initial schedule. Minnesota’s U.S. Bank Stadium saw its public debt retired in 2023, 23 years early, saving taxpayers in the state $226 million in interest. 

A somewhat similar situation is additionally unfolding in Washington, D.C., where public debt on the publicly owned Nationals Park is on target to be paid off in the next year, a decade early. Similarly, tax receipts for stadium bonds have far exceeded initial projections. That situation helped give local officials confidence to support about $1.1 billion in public funds for a new Commanders stadium. 

Bond schedules for stadium financing are typically conservative to help minimize investor risk from that debt. 

This college football season will be the first in which each Power 4 school will release daily player injury and availability reports, marking a new era for business opportunities in the sport.

The Big 12 announced Wednesday it would start requiring football teams to submit those reports, following a similar move by the ACC last month. SEC schools began issuing availability reports last year, and the Big Ten has been doing so since 2023.

While the practice has long been standard in the NFL and other professional leagues, it’s relatively new in college sports—and could help create more revenue. 

No Power 4 conference has an official sports betting partner. Still, now that each one is publicly releasing player availability information, it could only be a matter of time before data companies come on board to start purchasing and distributing pertinent betting metrics to sportsbooks. 

“The gambling and sports wagering landscape has blown up in a way where you see it everywhere now, and it’s really expected,” ACC commissioner Jim Phillips told Front Office Sports last month.

In April, the NCAA announced an expanded deal with Genius Sports, a major player with professional leagues, to start allowing sportsbooks to purchase official data feeds from NCAA championships, including March Madness, and use official NCAA marks and logos. The Mid-American Conference (MAC) has a similar deal with Genius Sports.

Phillips said the ACC has explored its own conference-level betting deal “from a little bit of a distance,” but stressed it needs “to be diligent and thoughtful in any process there.” 

Moving forward, the new era of college sports opens the door for top betting brands like FanDuel and DraftKings to become the “official sportsbook” of the SEC or Big Ten—a move that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago.

After Versant—the spin-off of most of Comcast’s cable networks—completed its first live-sports rights deal, two major aspects of the new media company are primed to define its future: independence from NBCUniversal and a light streaming strategy.

Earlier this week, the USGA announced a de facto extension of its current media-rights deal with NBC Sports, which will see the U.S. Open and other marquee championships remain on various combinations of NBC, Peacock, USA Network, and Golf Channel through 2032. It’s unique because all those properties currently fall under parent company Comcast, but when the spin-off becomes official (likely by the end of the year), USA Network and Golf Channel will be part of Versant. 

More Flexibility

Versant Sports president Matt Hong sees that separation as an advantage for future rights deals. “I do think we’ll have certain freedoms in flexibility as Versant that we previously didn’t have,” Hong, a former Turner Sports executive, tells Front Office Sports.

Via USA Network and Golf Channel, Versant also has golf rights for the PGA Tour, R&A (Open Championship), LPGA, PGA of America (Ryder Cup), as well as other sports leagues like NASCAR, English Premier League, NWSL, and WNBA. 

Moving forward, if NBC doesn’t want to renew with any of those leagues or pursue a new one, Versant still could. “There could certainly be a situation where it makes more sense for Versant than NBCU, in any rights deal, and we are now able to partner with folks … or with different streaming partners than we might not have been able to in the past, just because we will be separate with companies,” Hong says.

Now Streaming?

One area in which Versant is straying from the wider media norm is its streaming strategy. The company won’t have its own streaming service, but it will try to strike deals to simulcast some content on other platforms, including Peacock, which has previously streamed Golf Channel content.

However, Versant doesn’t plan on simul-streaming 100% of its live sports content, Hong says. 

“We’ve got a very robust set of properties that support our linear networks, and I think those are strong properties and strong networks with a lot of reach,” Hong says. “We’re not blind to how sports fans consume media or how leagues would like their content distributed. So, for now, that means partnering with other streaming platforms, if that’s the priority for a league. But that’s something that could potentially evolve for us down the road.”

NBC is exploring creating a new cable sports network, a source confirmed to FOS after The Wall Street Journal first reported the news last month. While that would appear to be a direct competitor to sports content on Versant networks, it’s likely that the new channel would mostly simulcast content that was set to exclusively stream on Peacock. Hong did not comment on the report.

Stake in the Game

Versant will be its own publicly traded company once the spin-off from Comcast is complete, but its networks could be a target for professional leagues to invest in, like the NFL recently did with ESPN.

“I think sports leagues really see themselves as increasingly in the media business,” Hong says. 

The idea of the PGA Tour acquiring an equity stake in Golf Channel has been casually discussed for years in the golf industry, which Hong didn’t comment on. The PGA Tour’s media-rights deals with NBCU/Versant, CBS, and ESPN will run through 2030, which could be an inflection point for Golf Channel’s future.