The NBA's Next Decade Will Not Look Like Its Last

In July 2024, the NBA announced that its next media rights cycle would be worth roughly $76 billion over eleven years, split across Disney, NBC, and Amazon. The first season under the new deal — 2025-26 — is wrapping up as I write this. The deal runs through 2035-36.

Eleven years is a long time.

I keep coming back to that duration. Eleven years ago was 2015. Snapchat was what teenagers were on. TikTok did not exist in the United States — ByteDance did not merge Musical.ly into TikTok in the US until August 2018. Netflix had not yet made Stranger Things, which premiered in July 2016. Regional sports networks were still a functioning business. Amazon did not carry its first NFL streams until the 2017 Thursday Night Football sublicense — and did not own exclusive NFL rights until the eleven-year Thursday Night Football deal that began in 2022. The idea that a single streaming service — any streaming service — would pay a league in the NBA’s range for rights would have sounded like a category error.

Eleven years from now is 2036.

I do not know what media looks like in 2036. Neither does Adam Silver. Neither does Bob Iger, and neither does Andy Jassy. What everyone did at the negotiating table in 2024 — which is what you always do in a media rights negotiation — was extrapolate from what had just happened and add a premium for scarcity. That is the right move, given the tools available. The NBA, to its credit, got paid for the cultural weight it actually carries in 2024. The partners, to their credit, paid for live inventory that has held its value better than almost anything else in the television economy.

But here is the thing about extrapolation. It works until it doesn’t.

I think the second half of this contract will feel like a different sport than the first half. Not because basketball will change — basketball does not change — but because three tectonic shifts are already underway underneath the deal, and each of them will keep moving, regardless of what the contract says.

The deal is not wrong. The world underneath it is changing.

What the Deal Was Priced Against

Before I get into what is shifting, it is worth being clear about what the deal was priced against. Not the number — the number is a function of competitive dynamics between three well-capitalized bidders — but the assumptions embedded in the number.

Assumption one: linear television, while shrinking, still has enough reach and advertising value to justify ESPN and NBC paying what they paid. The cable bundle is collapsing — I have written about this — but collapsing slowly enough that the tail is still lucrative.

Assumption two: the NBA remains the second-most-valuable American sports property, behind only the NFL, and there is no credible competitor for the audience it aggregates on a Tuesday night in February.

Assumption three: streaming — primarily through Amazon, but also through the digital tails of Disney and NBC — will pick up enough of the audience that does not watch linear to fill the gap. That the NBA can, essentially, migrate its audience from cable to streaming without losing the monetization layer that makes the rights worth what they are.

Each of these assumptions is defensible in 2024. I am not sure any of them survives 2030 without significant asterisks.

The deal was priced against a demographic, behavioral, and distribution reality that is already shifting.

There are three shifts I want to walk through. I have opinions about each. I do not have perfect data about any of them, because nobody does — the measurement infrastructure for the media economy in 2026 is still built for a world that ended around 2018. Where I have specific figures, I will cite them. Where I do not, I will say so and argue structurally. Structural arguments do not need false specificity to land.

Shift One — Generational Inversion

There is a particular kind of NBA fan that I suspect the league is aware of but does not fully know how to price.

This fan can tell you, unprompted, about the Victor Wembanyama dunk from last week, the Luka Dončić step-back that went viral on Sunday, the LeBron-to-Bronny highlight that racked up tens of millions of plays in under an hour. This fan knows every player, knows every contract, knows every trade rumor, knows which rookie is about to pop and which veteran is on the decline.

This fan has not watched a full NBA game in months. Maybe years.

I want to be careful here, because I do not have proprietary viewership data, and the public data is partial. What the public data does say, though, is that the audience on streaming is running much younger than the audience on linear. Sports Media Watch reported that NBA on Prime Video had a median age of 46.8 through the first weeks of the 2025-26 season — about eight years younger than the linear networks. Sportico put the NBA on Prime median age at 49.4 across the full season window against 56.2 for linear NBA. The direction is unmistakable: the split audience is the story, and the linear half is aging. What I can say, as someone who spends a lot of time inside the sports media business, is that the anecdotal pattern around clip-first fandom is unmistakable too. The NBA’s cultural center — the place where the league lives in the popular imagination — increasingly sits inside social clips, inside group chats, inside short-form vertical video, inside fantasy and betting apps that deliver the moment without the match.

This is not a clip versus game binary. Clips are generative of games — plenty of people watch the full broadcast because a clip hooked them. But there is a growing cohort for whom the clip is the product. The game is a dependency, not a destination.

If you are selling eleven years of linear and streaming rights against the assumption that the full-game audience converts at historical rates, this cohort is your problem. Because the monetization model for a sixteen-second vertical clip viewed on Instagram is not the same as the monetization model for two and a half hours of a Lakers-Celtics broadcast. Not close. Not even in the same order of magnitude on a per-minute basis.

The NBA understands this better than most leagues. The league office has been unusually willing to let clips proliferate, to work with creators, to accept that cultural reach is upstream of paid viewership. I think that instinct is correct. But the instinct does not solve the economics. Cultural reach at clip scale does not, on its own, pay for eleven-year rights deals priced against full-game viewership.

Somewhere in that gap is a generation of fans who love the NBA and will not, as a rule, sit down for a full game. The league’s partners bought inventory assuming this gap does not widen. I think it is almost certain to widen.

What happens when it does?

One answer is that the full-game audience gets older, denser, and more valuable per viewer — a smaller but more monetizable core, which is what has happened to every mature television franchise in history. That is a defensible outcome but a shrinking one. Another answer is that the NBA, alongside its partners, invents a product that sits between the clip and the game — a ten-minute curated watch, a fourth-quarter-only stream, an AI-generated highlight pass personalized to the fan. The partners have the engineering capacity to do this. The question is whether the league and the partners agree on who owns the rights to that intermediate surface, and whether the money follows.

I have argued before that the universal remote control — that physical object that defined how a household watched sports for forty years — is dead, and with it, the assumption that an entire family sits down in front of one screen at one time. The NBA fan of 2030 is not sitting in the living room at 8pm Eastern waiting for the opening tip. That fan is on a phone, on a commute, on a treadmill, watching whatever the algorithm served, which may or may not be the game their rights-holder paid to broadcast.

Extrapolate that for eleven years. Now ask yourself whether the NBA’s next decade looks like the last one.

Shift Two — International Reconsolidation

For most of my adult life, the NBA’s international story has been a one-way street. Players from everywhere in the world come to the NBA, because the NBA is where the best basketball is played and where the money is. International fans watch the NBA because it is where their national hero plays. The league has marketed itself, correctly, as the global top of the pyramid.

That story is starting to have exceptions.

The EuroLeague is getting better. Not in some abstract aspirational sense — in a direct, measurable, year-over-year sense. The caliber of basketball in the EuroLeague, the depth of rosters, the coaching, the tactical sophistication — all of it has been on an upward trajectory, accelerated by the fact that a growing number of elite international players are choosing to stay in Europe longer, choosing to return to Europe at a point in their careers where a decade ago they would have stuck it out in the NBA, and in some cases choosing to go to Europe from the NBA.

The Australian NBL has become a credible development alternative for top American prospects — LaMelo Ball signed with the Illawarra Hawks in 2019 on his way to being drafted third overall, R. J. Hampton played for the New Zealand Breakers before going 24th in 2020, and others have used the NBL Next Stars program as a path to the NBA draft, giving the NBL a recurring American-interest storyline that it did not have a decade ago. The Basketball Africa League, founded in 2019 by the NBA and FIBA and tipping off in 2021, is building out a competitive infrastructure on a continent whose basketball talent pipeline is, by every credible estimate, underexploited by a factor of many. The Philippines, Japan, and parts of Latin America all have domestic leagues growing faster than most American commentators realize.

None of this is a threat to the NBA in the competitive sense. The NBA will remain the top league in the world for the foreseeable future. The talent will continue to flow toward it. I am not predicting the NBA gets dethroned. I do not think that is happening.

But the media rights math does not care about which league is the best league. The media rights math cares about where the attention goes.

If the share of elite basketball consumption watched outside the NBA rises — even modestly, even incrementally, even only in specific international markets where the NBA has historically sold a lot of League Pass — that is a direct hit on the growth assumption embedded in the $76 billion. The league has spent the last twenty years arguing, credibly, that it is a global growth story with an underpenetrated international audience. That was true. That is still true. It may be less true in 2030 than it was in 2024.

The NBA does not publicly disclose League Pass international subscriber growth at the country level. What the EuroLeague has disclosed is telling in its own right — EuroLeague.TV reported a 37% year-over-year increase in OTT subscriptions alongside the viewership growth cited above. The absence of a comparable NBA disclosure is, at minimum, something a second-half-of-deal bidder should notice.

The second-order effect is subtler but I think more important. The NBA has historically been able to define the sport of basketball internationally — what the game looks like, how it is played, what kids in playgrounds from Manila to Madrid emulate. That hegemony has started to fracture. A kid in Belgrade today can watch Nikola Jokić dominate the NBA playoffs and watch the EuroLeague final live and follow the ABA League standings, all without friction, all on the same phone. The kid’s mental model of professional basketball is not NBA-centric the way it was in 2008. It is basketball-centric, with the NBA as one very prominent node in a graph.

A kid who grows up with that mental model is not lost to the NBA. But that kid is a different kind of customer than the kid who grew up thinking the NBA was basketball. And in media economics, different kinds of customers monetize at different rates.

Eleven years gives a lot of runway for mental models to shift.

Shift Three — The Betting-Content Merge

Here is the shift I am most confident about, because it is already here and it is already the dominant mode of engagement for a large and growing segment of the NBA audience.

The most engaging NBA product in America, for millions of fans, is not the broadcast. It is the live-bet surface inside FanDuel, DraftKings, or their peer sportsbooks. The game is happening — but the game is happening inside an app where every possession is priced, every matchup is surfaced, every player prop is available to be played, reloaded, hedged, cashed out. The broadcast is a window on the action. The app is a participatory layer on top of the action. For a certain kind of fan, the app is now the primary interface and the broadcast is the ambient soundtrack.

I am not going to invent specific product-feature claims about any particular sportsbook. Operator-level NBA in-play handle, player-prop market counts per game, and bets-per-user metrics for 2025-26 are not disclosed at the granularity that would let me cite a number. Flutter’s FanDuel disclosures and the comparable DraftKings earnings commentary describe a product that is aggressively expanding the in-play surface — same-game parlays, player-prop injury protection, live-priced bet-builder markets — without publishing the per-game market counts.

What I will argue structurally is this: the sportsbook product gets better every year, and the broadcast product, structurally, does not. A broadcast in 2035 will still be a broadcast — a produced video feed of a basketball game with play-by-play commentary and advertising breaks. A sportsbook app in 2035 will be whatever the product teams at FanDuel and DraftKings and every competitor can ship in eleven years of iteration. The gap between those two surfaces, measured in engagement density per minute, is going to widen, not narrow.

The NBA, on the current structure, is a licensor to the sportsbooks. It sells data rights, integrity fees, official-partner designations. It does not, in any structural sense, own the live-bet surface. The sportsbooks own that. The sportsbooks are building the product that, increasingly, is how the NBA gets consumed.

I think the league cannot keep treating sportsbooks as licensees.

Not because the commercial deals are bad — the commercial deals are fine — but because the most engaging surface of your own product is being built by someone else, and that someone else is not obligated to optimize for the health of the league. The sportsbook optimizes for handle, for retention, for in-app engagement, for lifetime value. Those metrics correlate with a healthy NBA most of the time. They do not correlate all of the time. The divergences are where the problems live.

Consider the player-prop market. A sportsbook offering thousands of player props per game is, effectively, giving every bench player a market cap. Every rotation decision by a coach affects a market. Every stat-padding garbage-time minute is a payout event for somebody. The incentive structure that the sportsbook is introducing into the sport — at a scale that simply did not exist a decade ago — is not something the league designed. It is something the league is accommodating.

The second-half-of-the-contract question is whether the league remains accommodating or whether it tries to bring the live-bet surface inside the tent. The NBA has structural advantages here. It controls the officials, the data feeds, the schedule, the broadcast, the rules. If it wanted to ship a first-party betting-integrated product — and more importantly, if it wanted its media partners to ship such a product — it has the assets to do it. Amazon, especially, has the engineering and distribution to make an integrated watch-and-bet surface real inside Prime Video in a way no traditional broadcaster can.

Do I think this happens cleanly? No. Regulatory environments vary state by state. The league’s integrity concerns are real and well-founded. The history of sports betting and sports leagues is complicated by decades of mutual antagonism that the last several years have not fully undone. But the economic pressure to close the gap between the broadcast and the bet is going to keep rising for the entire duration of this contract.

Somewhere in the second half of this deal, somebody — league, partner, sportsbook, or some consortium of all three — is going to ship an integrated product that feels, to the fan, like the way to watch the NBA. And when that happens, every metric in the rights deal will need to be re-understood. Because the definition of what it means to “watch” an NBA game will have shifted.

What This Means for the Back Half

I want to be careful about what I am and am not claiming.

I am not claiming the NBA is in decline. It is not. By every measure that matters — revenue, player talent, international presence, cultural relevance — the league is in the healthiest position in its history. The 2024 media deal is the strongest single piece of evidence for that health, not a counterexample to it.

I am also not claiming the partners made a bad deal. Disney, NBC, and Amazon each got what they needed. Disney got ESPN’s marquee property for another cycle, which is existentially important to ESPN. NBC got a top-tier sports franchise to slot against football in a post-Comcast-cable world. Amazon got the thing it has been building toward since the NFL Thursday night package: legitimacy as a live-sports destination, with the scale of basketball’s hundreds of annual game windows to keep Prime subscribers coming back. Each of those outcomes was worth what each partner paid, measured against the alternatives available in 2024.

What I am claiming is narrower and, I think, harder to dismiss: the world underneath the deal is not holding still for eleven years.

Generational inversion means the cohort growing into peak-consumption age does not consume basketball the way the cohort paying for cable consumed basketball. International reconsolidation means the growth assumption about international League Pass and global audience share has more competition than it did. The betting-content merge means the most engaging surface of the sport is being built outside the rights-holder’s product and will keep being built there unless the league intervenes structurally.

Any one of these is manageable. All three, compounding over eleven years, produce a different sport.

The NBA has navigated transitions before. The shift from network to cable. The shift from cable to streaming. The Jordan retirement. The lockouts. The analytics revolution. The globalization of talent. The league has been, among major American sports institutions, the most willing to adapt — the most willing to let the product evolve, the most willing to experiment with rules and formats, the most willing to lean into cultural currents rather than fight them. That disposition is why the 2024 deal got priced where it did.

I think the same disposition is going to be required to get through 2035 intact. Not just intact — to come out the other side with the league meaningfully stronger than it is today, which is the bar the partners paid for. It will require a product roadmap that treats clip culture as a first-class citizen rather than a leakage problem. It will require an international strategy that assumes competitive pressure on attention rather than assuming uncontested growth. It will require a betting-and-media integration that the league owns rather than licenses.

None of that is impossible. Some of it is already underway. But the gap between what the contract assumes and what the world is about to deliver is, I think, wider than the people who signed the contract are prepared for.

The Thing That Is Not Changing

I wrote last summer about what isn’t changing in live sports — that even amid every wave of disruption in the media economy, live sports remains the most resilient asset in television, because the thing it delivers (synchronous mass attention, unfakeable human drama, ritual and identity) is the thing that gets scarcer as everything else gets more abundant.

I still believe that. Nothing I have written here contradicts it.

The NBA will remain, across any plausible version of the next decade, one of the three or four most valuable sports properties in the world. The 2035 finals will draw a massive audience, across whatever combination of screens exists in 2035. Fans will still feel the same thing watching a Game 7 that I felt watching the 1990 World Cup final on a black-and-white television in India. That part does not change.

What changes is everything around the core. How the game gets to the fan. Who builds the product layer on top of the game. How the attention gets sliced, priced, and monetized. Where the cultural center of the sport lives when nobody is watching a full broadcast. Which leagues the international fan considers peer competition versus lower-tier alternatives.

These are the things the rights deal cannot freeze in place.

The first half of the contract will look a lot like the last cycle. Linear will shrink on schedule. Streaming will grow on schedule. The league will be healthy and profitable and culturally dominant in the ways it has been for the last fifteen years. Everyone will feel good about the deal.

The second half is where the interesting questions live. Not whether the NBA survives — it obviously does — but whether the product the partners bought in 2024 still exists, in any recognizable form, in 2035.

I think it will exist. I think it will have to have been rebuilt at least once, probably twice, along the way. And I think the partners who understand that upfront — who treat the rights deal as a license to build, not a license to extract — are the ones who come out of 2035 with something worth having.

The deal is not wrong. It is a snapshot of a sport priced at a moment.

The moment is already moving.