David Zaslav Says WBD Remains In Talks With The NBA, But The Company’s Sports Portfolio Would Still Be “Very Robust” Without It

Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav says execs “continue to talk to the NBA” about a renewal of rights, but he argued that even without pro hoops the company’s sports offerings are “very robust.”

“I was just down in Atlanta. We’ve got a great team down there and we love our experience with the NBA,” the exec said in an appearance Thursday at Bernstein’s Strategic Decisions Conference.

“But in general, we’re a leader in sports around the world. We have the Olympics in Europe … a full buffet of content around the world. We have football in a number of markets in Europe and Latin America. This is what we do for a living. We’re in the business of sport and in sport, deals come up and you look at those deals and you make a decision about the overall quality of the full menu of content you have for each of your platforms.”

A number of recent press reports have indicated that WBD could be on the outside looking in with the NBA after four decades of being a home for the sport and its best-known studio show, Inside the NBA. The current rights deals expire at the end of the 2024-25 season and WBD did not reach an agreement during the exclusive negotiating window with the league.

NBCUniversal is said to have returned to the arena after two decades away and Disney-ESPN has reached terms on a renewal. As with the NFL, which carved out a set of streaming exclusives for Prime Video, the NBA is understood to have done the same with the Amazon division. No formal announcements have been made, and there are conflicting reports about WBD’s rights to match the bids of others given the company’s status as an incumbent rights holder.

The company has been “on a journey here in the U.S.” in terms of sports, Zaslav said, noting the addition of NHL, NASCAR and college football rights in recent years. “When you put that together with March Madness and baseball playoffs and the U.S. soccer that we have, it’s a very robust offering for consumers that they can watch on TNT in the U.S. all year round,” he said. “That is our job, to continue to look at, how do we continue to nourish an audience that loves sports on TNT? … That’s what we’ve been doing. We’ve been very strategic about adding sport to TNT over the last several years and we feel very good about where we are.”

Funding sports rights (in the case of the NBA, a proposition worth tens of billions of dollars) is difficult for WBD given its substantial debt load left over from the 2022 closing of the WarnerMedia-Discovery merger. The company’s stock has sunk below $8 a share, less than a third of its value at the time of the merger, as investors weigh the company’s prospects.

As rights elapse and new ones become available, Zaslav continued, execs try to be “strategic about what content we have on TNT in the UK, what content we have in Europe, what content we have in America and make sure that we have what we think is enough content to create real shareholder value.”