In just about one month the NBA will officially tip off its first season under a brand new set of media rights agreements.
Understandably, there will be some confusion. Gone are the days where basketball fans know TNT handles Tuesdays and Thursdays, with ESPN taking Wednesdays and the weekends. Now, Sundays belong to NBC (except they also belong to ABC for part of the season). Monday nights are on Peacock. Tuesday nights are on NBC (but what game you get depends on where you live). Wednesdays are still on ESPN. Thursdays are now on Prime Video. And Fridays and Saturdays go to ESPN and ABC respectively.
There’s [a lot of moving parts](https://awfulannouncing.com/nba/new-broadcast-rights-package-espn-amazon-nbc.html), but the NBA believes fans will adapt.
Gene Li, the NBA’s VP of broadcast scheduling [sat down with Jon Lewis of Sports Media Watch](https://www.sportsmediawatch.com/2025/09/nba-media-rights-changes-learning-curve-details/) to explain the league’s rationale behind some of the changes, and go over some of the finer points of the NBA’s new schedule that are still unclear.
First and foremost, Li outlined how the league will integrate a feature into the NBA app and NBA.com that will lead viewers directly to the app currently streaming a national game. Any NBC games will bounce users to Peacock, ABC or ESPN to ESPN’s new app, and Prime Video games to that app.
Li further explained exactly how NBC’s Tuesday night primetime games will be distributed. Weeknight live sports packages are rare on broadcast television as they generally interfere with local news programming on the West Coast. To circumvent that problem, the NBA is scheduling two games for NBC each Tuesday, one that tips off at 8 p.m. ET on the East Coast and another that tips off at 8 p.m. PT (11 p.m. ET) on the West Coast. Most NBC affiliates will air just the one game that fits its timezone, while the other game will be available on Peacock.
Per Li, the league will not treat these games as they do other network “doubleheaders” where tip-off for the late game will be pushed back if the first game is running late. He also notes that the 11 p.m. ET tips won’t extend into the playoffs.
Another question mark headed into the season was the fate of NBA TV’s games. When the league announced its national television schedule last month, NBA TV was not included. However, the league-owned network will still have a slate of games, which it presumably needs in order to fulfill its contractual obligations to distributors. Li notes that NBA TV’s schedule will be released “very soon,” with Lewis indicating that the inventory will likely fall on nights of the week in which the league’s other media partners do not have games. Operations for NBA TV will be handled by the league itself this year after its longtime partnership with TNT Sports ends October 1.
Li also revealed that not every national game under the new media agreements will be exclusive. Some games will still air on regional sports networks in the local markets. The NBA’s new deals increase the volume of nationally televised games by 45%, which necessarily means fewer games for local networks to air. To help ease the burden on RSNs, the NBA is keeping NBC’s Tuesday night games non-exclusive. NBC’s Sunday night package and ABC’s games will continue to have full exclusivity.
All said, there will be a decidedly new feel to this year’s NBA season. Fans will have to relearn the rhythms of NBA viewership, which may prove a bit challenging as the league expands from two media partners to three, and three networks airing games to five.