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You just saw No. 41 at the Mark Aguirre Jersey Retirement ceremony earlier this week and, to my knowledge, he and Mavericks majority owner Patrick Dumont have had an open dialogue since the spring ... months before Harrison's firing. The Mavericks badly want Nowitzki to return to the organization and have conveyed to him that he can do so in any role he chooses, but the 47-year-old has focused this season on his new job as a studio analyst for Amazon as well as his various duties and travel obligations as a FIBA board member and global ambassador for the sport's international governing body.
But he’ll be doing a game broadcast for Amazon on Thursday, when he returns to Capital One Arena to do color commentary for the Wizards’ game against the Milwaukee Bucks. That isn’t a coincidence. The organization is also honoring Wall, the team’s all-time leader in assists (5,282) and steals (976) during the game, which is being billed as “John Wall appreciation night,” part of multiple festivities honoring Wall, the top pick in the 2010 draft. “John is in our pantheon,” Wizards owner and governor Ted Leonsis said.
The NBA brought on NBC and Amazon as new partners, while parting ways with Warner Bros. Discovery for the first time in more than two decades. The deal allowed for 75 more national games this year with the addition of NBC’s over-the-air channel, and exclusive streamed games on Peacock and Prime Video for the first time. But it’s also led to fragmentation and rising costs for fans hoping to catch all NBA games. The table above shows that a monthly subscription across all platforms needed to watch NBA games will cost nearly $130 before tax (YouTube TV is an example of a live-TV service, comparable to cable). It will cost nearly $1,000 for an eight-month subscription, which would encompass a full NBA season, and nearly $1,400 for annual subscriptions across the four platforms.
The new NBA media rights deals is still paying dividends two months in. NBA games were averaging 1.81 million viewers across NBCUniversal, ESPN and Amazon’s Prime Video through last week’s NBA Cup Final, a figure that includes Adobe Analytics-measured viewership for NBC games — up 27% from last year and the highest average at this point of a season since 2017. The year-over-year increase rises to 53% including games on NBA TV, which is airing far fewer games this season than in past years, and thus drags down the average far less.
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Coming out of bankruptcy with a much lighter debt load, Main Street Sports has struck partnerships with companies such as Amazon and FanDuel, including rebranding its TV channels and direct-to-consumer offering as FanDuel Sports Network. Today, Main Street Sports has the local rights to 29 major league teams in the U.S., across the National Basketball Association, the National Hockey League and Major League Baseball.
Las Vegas is only getting hotter, as Amazon Music has enlisted Nas to deliver a special performance between the Emirates NBA Cup 2025 Semifinals. Live from the Toshiba Arena Plaza, Nas will headline Amazon’s “In the Paint” concert on Saturday (Dec. 13.), as he’s coming off his hotly anticipated collaborative project, Light Years, with DJ Premier.
NBA Nightcap, Amazon’s postgame talk and analysis show, has been a hit in its debut season, adding innovations to the format such as high-tech studio segments and fresh voices from vets like Blake Griffin, Dirk Nowitzki, Steve Nash, and Udonis Haslem. This week, the show will add a new wrinkle: Musical performances. On Friday, December 5, NBA Nightcap will debut its new segment, “Amazon Music Presents: In The Paint,” with its first-ever musical guests, Clipse.
Spectrum's deal with the Lakers reportedly pays them an average of $150 million through 2032, the single entity that drives the team's financial advantage over its rivals. It's roughly triple the average of the rest of the league, sources said. Last year, NBA teams received about $110 million each from the national rights deals. This year, that number is boosting to more than $140 million as part of a new 11-year, $77 billion agreement with ESPN, Amazon and NBC. Earlier this year, the New York Knicks, who have the second-largest local media deal, accepted a 28% reduction in annual payments due to financial problems at rights holder MSG Network. The Knicks had been receiving $135 million a year before the reduction.
Ian Begley: NBA says nearly 37 million people in the U.S. watched opening week of season across NBC/Peacock, ESPN and Amazon, which is the most viewers for an opening week in 15 years. (* excludes 2011 and 2020, when season started Christmas week.)
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Marc Stein is taking his talents to Amazon Prime. Stein has joined Amazon’s NBA coverage as an editorial contributor, the network confirmed to Front Office Sports. Stein’s role will be off-air, making sure facts and figures are journalistically sound before they are discussed by the studio crew and game announcers on-air. It is a similar role to what the legendary late ESPN insider Chris Mortensen used to hold with Amazon’s NFL coverage.
The good news: For the first time ever, NBA fans will be able to stream every single game of the upcoming season. The bad news: It’s going to cost them nearly $1,000. What’s driving up the price? The 2025-26 basketball season, which begins Tuesday night, is moving games over to a bunch of new streaming services. Warner Bros. Discovery’s WBD +10.97% TNT is no longer showing games, while Amazon AMZN +2.56% and NBC (and its Peacock streaming service) will broadcast games instead. Because of this change, fans who have cut the cable cord are going to need to add more streaming subscriptions to their catalog of services to stay up to date with the NBA. And many of these streaming services have raised their prices over the past year.
Amazon is just the latest company picking a celebrity for NBA theme music. NBC tapped Lenny Kravitz to perform the opening music for its upcoming Sunday Night Basketball programming.
Amazon’s advertising unit on Wednesday introduced its roster of presenting sponsors for the opening season of Prime Video’s NBA coverage, a clutch of top-tier sports spenders that includes the likes of AT&T, Mercedes-Benz and State Farm. As part of a series of signings that will help defray Amazon’s annual $1.8 billion rights payment to the NBA, the online retailer/streamer has landed AT&T as the title sponsor of its new halftime show (The Half).