The NBA is officially (finally) headed back to NBC. After months of reporting about verbal agreements, the league finally announced the full framework of their new 11-year, $77 billion national media rights deal (which includes the WNBA) with ESPN, NBC, and Amazon. TNT attempted to match Amazon’s package, but the NBA declined their offer, noting a number of areas in which TNT/Max are unable to match what Amazon is promising to deliver.
As a result, there’s still some likely litigation to come on the Amazon/TNT section of the deal, but NBC is locked in and will now spend the Olympics hyping up their new NBA package starting in 2025 — with, yes, the return of “Roundball Rock”. As such, NBC will begin putting its plan in place for their crew in the weeks to come, and with games on three nights per week — Sundays and Tuesdays on NBC, Mondays on Peacock — they’ll need multiple broadcast teams plus a studio show.
The plan is to build out their Sunday Night Basketball package like Sunday Night Football, rolling straight from NFL season into the NBA stretch run on Sunday nights in February. That means an hour-long pregame show and TBD plans for postgame, as nightly news cuts into what they can do after, but Peacock offers a place for a lengthier window. As for the talent, NBC will have to make a number of external hires on the analyst side, but they have at least one play-by-play locked in, as NBC Sports president Rick Cordella told Richard Deitsch of The Athletic that the plan is for Mike Tirico to be the “A” team play-by-play announcer.
Tirico was previously in that role with ESPN and ABC, calling multiple NBA Finals, and it seems he’ll slide straight from the SNF booth next to Cris Collinsworth straight into the lead NBA team — how this impacts the other sports Tirico is involved in, namely golf, is also not quite known. The other questions will be whether he calls games on Tuesdays during the NFL season at all, and also how they fill out the rest of their team.
Maria Taylor would make a ton of sense to go from hosting Football Night in America to Basketball Night in America (assuming they stick with that branding), as she was previously ESPN’s top studio host for NBA coverage. Beyond that, Noah Eagle will call Olympics basketball alongside Dwyane Wade this summer, which could be a bit of an audition for one of the NBC play-by-play slots. NBC would almost assuredly love to keep Wade involved, but it’s not clear if he’s up for another full-time analyst gig after walking away from his role at Turner after a season. From there, most of the TNT broadcast teams seem likely up for grabs, with big names like Kevin Harlan, Ian Eagle, Reggie Miller, and Stan Van Gundy all without an NBA gig after next season — Amazon has already been linked to interest in Eagle for their top booth.
