The Cheapest Truck Wins
Thirteen NBA teams and seven NHL teams became local-television free agents this spring, and every bid on the table is a haircut. The post-RSN war will not be won on the rights line — it will be won on the production line, and AI tooling is quietly rewriting that cost curve.
Thirteen NBA teams and seven NHL teams woke up this spring as local-television free agents.
When Main Street Sports Group announced in April that it would wind down — the corporate successor to Diamond Sports, the operator of the FanDuel Sports Network portfolio, the last big load-bearing beam of the regional sports network era — twenty franchises lost their local broadcast home in a single stroke. The bids they have been fielding since are not rescue offers. They are haircuts. DAZN has been courting the orphaned teams with rights-fee cuts of as much as 40 percent. Per SBJ’s reporting on the scramble, Fubo has been offering minimum guarantees in the range of $8–15 million per team; Gray, Scripps, and Nexstar have been coming in below $10 million. And then there is the line in Yahoo Sports’ write-up of that reporting that I cannot pretend to read neutrally: “Even the free streaming service Victory+ is making a play for these rights.”