NBA Files Motion To Dismiss WBD’s Lawsuit

The NBA has filed its motion for a dismissal late Friday of a lawsuit by Warner Bros. Discovery, which alleges the league breached its contract by not allowing WBD to exercise its matching offer for a new media rights deal and instead moving forward with Amazon.

In a 28-page filing, along with supporting documents, the NBA asked the court to dismiss the lawsuit with prejudice, meaning it couldn’t be refiled in the future.

“TBS chose not to match NBCUniversal’s offer, which would have enabled TBS to continue distributing games via its TNT linear cable network,” the league wrote. “Instead, TBS purported to match the less-expensive Amazon offer, but only after revising it to include traditional distribution rights and making numerous other substantive changes.”

Amazon’s offer was roughly $1.8 billion per year, and NBC’s was roughly $2.45 billion per year.

The league said that Warner Bros. Discovery “made substantive revisions to eight of the Amazon offer’s 27 sections (including revisions to 22 different subsections), changed 11 defined terms that are collectively used roughly 100 separate times, struck nearly 300 words, and added over 270 new words, substantially altering the parties’ rights and obligations in the process.”

The NBA’s lawyers went on, arguing, “Far from accepting each term of Amazon’s offer, TBS’s revisions constituted a counteroffer that the NBA was free to reject.”