The NBA's new $76 billion, 11-year media deal with Disney, NBC and Amazon pushed national ad revenue to a record $2.11 billion in its first season — a 38% jump. Yet ESPN, the league's longest-tenured TV partner, still made about $47.6 million less than before. A bigger pie doesn't mean a bigger slice for everyone at the table.
So What Did the NBA Actually Sign in 2024?
Here's the deal itself, since the headline number tends to swallow the details underneath it. In July 2024, the NBA signed an 11-year agreement with Disney (ABC and ESPN), NBCUniversal (NBC and Peacock) and Amazon Prime Video, running from the 2025-26 season through 2035-36, worth a combined $76 billion, according to the league's official announcement. It replaced a nine-year, $24 billion deal. The league framed the jump as multiplying its annual national media revenue by roughly 2.6 times, with an expected salary-cap increase of about 10% a year starting in 2025.
NBA Commissioner Adam Silver said the agreements were built to "maximize the reach and accessibility of NBA games for fans in the United States and around the world" — a line that, three networks later, turns out to be doing real work in explaining the split below.
How Is the Season Actually Divided Between the Three Partners?
Three companies, one league, and a scheduling grid that took months to finalize. Each partner bought a different shape of the season, and the mix says a lot about what each was actually purchasing.
| Partner | Regular-Season Games | Signature Windows |
|---|---|---|
| Disney (ABC/ESPN) | Up to 80 | All NBA Finals, Christmas Day, ABC weekend primetime |
| NBCUniversal (NBC/Peacock) | Up to 100 | Sunday/Tuesday NBC nights, Monday doubleheaders on Peacock, All-Star Weekend |
| Amazon Prime Video | 66 | Thursday/Friday doubleheaders, NBA Cup, Play-In Tournament |
Free over-the-air broadcast also grew sharply, from a guaranteed minimum of 15 nationally televised games under the old contract to roughly 75 a season split across ABC and NBC. Conference finals rotate among the three partners too, with ESPN carrying a series in 10 of the 11 years and NBC and Amazon each carrying one in 6 of the 11 — a schedule built so no single partner's marquee window repeats the same way every spring.
So Why Did League Ad Revenue Jump 38% While ESPN's Fell?
This is the part that actually explains the deal's logic, and it runs against the top-line growth story. Total national NBA advertising revenue reached $2.11 billion in the 2025-26 season, up 38% — about $580 million — from the last season under the old deal, according to Sportico's analysis of the ad market, as reported by Yahoo Sports. Regular-season ad sales alone rose 74%, to $870 million from $500 million, while postseason sales climbed 27% to $988 million. Nationally televised windows expanded from 172 to 247, and broadcast games on ABC and NBC combined nearly tripled, from 24 to 62.
None of that growth landed evenly, though. ESPN, which held exclusive national NBA rights under the old deal, brought in $47.6 million less in the new deal's first season than it had before. The reason is inventory, not audience: ESPN now shares national NBA programming with two other companies instead of controlling it alone, which shrinks the pool of games the network has to sell ads against even as the total NBA advertising market grows around it. That's the trade the league made on purpose — less exclusivity for any single partner, in exchange for more total money and more live windows for fans across three services instead of one.
What Happened to TNT, the NBA's Partner Since 1989?
Warner Bros. Discovery, which had carried NBA games on TNT continuously since 1989, was left out of the new deal entirely. The NBA said WBD "did not match the terms of Amazon's offer," according to CBS Sports' reporting on the negotiations. TNT disputed that account, saying the NBA "grossly misinterpreted" its contractual matching rights and vowed to "take appropriate action" — a disagreement over the matching process itself that is separate from, and unresolved by, anything in the media-rights announcement.
It's tempting to read the ESPN ad-revenue dip as proof the new deal backfired on Disney. It didn't. ESPN still holds exclusive Finals rights and the league's marquee holiday windows, and over-the-air distribution roughly quintupled — a real number when cable's overall footprint keeps shrinking.
What the ESPN dip actually shows is simpler and more durable: a media-rights deal getting bigger in total dollars is not the same claim as every partner inside it getting a bigger check. Somebody's exclusivity almost always funds somebody else's expansion.
What Does This Mean for the Next Decade of NBA Business?
The salary cap is the number that ties the television math back to the product on the floor. The league projected roughly 10% annual cap growth starting in 2025 off the new deal's revenue — a pace that changes how front offices plan extensions and how quickly max contracts climb across an 11-year window that runs into the mid-2030s.
That's the whole case: three checks instead of one, a record ad haul in year one, and no guarantee that any single check in the stack gets bigger just because the total on the table did.
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