Fifteen Free Games, Then a Paywall: The NBA’s Stopgap Year in Local TV

The NBA season opens tomorrow with three games on NBC and Peacock. The first one, Celtics at Pistons, tips off at 3 p.m. Eastern. Detroit fans spent the summer learning that the Pistons are back on free over-the-air TV for the first time since 2005. On opening day, that free channel has nothing to show. The game is a national exclusive.

That is the familiar part of the US blackout system, covered in Part 1 of this series. The unfamiliar part is local. When FanDuel Sports Network’s operator shut down after last season, 13 NBA teams lost their local TV home at once. All 13 have a replacement in place for opening night, the last of them announced six days before it. Almost no two picked the same kind.

Part 2 mapped the NHL’s local models side by side. This part follows one NBA fan through the three questions a “where to watch” answer now has to resolve: which tier, which territory, and which night.

Question 1: Which tier is the fan on?

The headline number of the NBA summer is 15.

The Cavaliers, Pacers, Timberwolves and Grizzlies each made DAZN their exclusive local streaming home. Each then signed a local broadcaster to put exactly 15 games on free over-the-air TV. The Spurs did the same with 22 games. Everything else in those five markets is on DAZN, from $19.99 a month.

That creates two tiers inside a single team’s season. In Minneapolis, the Timberwolves will stream 65 regular-season games on DAZN. Fifteen of them are also free on KARE 11. Forty-nine are on DAZN and nowhere else locally. In Indianapolis, the 15 free games run on Nexstar’s WTTV and WXIN.

The cable box no longer settles it either. DAZN is a separate streaming subscription, not a channel in a cable or satellite lineup. DirecTV’s own NBA guide says so in those words. A fan in Cleveland or Memphis who pays for a full cable package gets the free simulcasts and the national games. For the rest, they need an app.

Across all 13 former FanDuel teams, the replacements now look like this:

Prices differ too. The Bucks launched their own app, Bucks+, on Oct. 1 at $19.99 a month or $99.99 for the season, for Wisconsin residents only. The Thunder’s app, Thunder+, costs $19.99 a month or $108.99 for the season.

The Clippers finished last. Until Oct. 14, they had announced a home for only 10 regular-season games, on KTLA. That day they relaunched their own channel, ClipperVision, which will carry every Clippers game not reserved for national TV. It is on Spectrum, DirecTV and Fubo, and fans without pay TV can subscribe directly. It is a one-year arrangement. Six days before tip-off, the answer to “where do I watch the Clippers?” changed for most of the season at once. For a “where to watch” product, that is the hardest kind of record: one rewritten in the week the season starts.

Question 2: Where is the fan standing?

Local rights only apply inside a team’s territory, and the NBA does not publish one territory map. Each team, or its streaming partner, publishes its own.

Read them side by side and they overlap.

• Iowa is inside the Timberwolves’ DAZN territory and the Pacers’ DAZN territory. A fan in Des Moines is local to two teams, on the same app, in the same season.
• Kansas is entirely Thunder+ territory, and partly Timberwolves territory.
• Arkansas appears in the territories of the Thunder, the Grizzlies and the Rockets.
• Texas is split between three teams: the Spurs, the Rockets and the Mavericks.

Overlap matters because it decides what the fan cannot watch. NBA League Pass, the out-of-market package, blacks out the local team or teams and every nationally broadcast game. The NBA’s own watch pages say the restriction is based on the viewer’s current location, not their billing address. A Timberwolves fan from Des Moines who travels to Minneapolis for a week is still local. A Thunder fan who moves from Tulsa to Chicago is suddenly out of market.

The same city can also give two answers for two sports. Minnesota Wild games stream locally on Prime Video this season. Timberwolves games stream on DAZN. Same fan, same living room, same week in October: two services, two subscriptions, two sets of rules.

Question 3: What night is it?

National games override the local layer completely. This is year two of the NBA’s 11-year national deals: 80 games on ABC and ESPN, 100 on NBC and Peacock, and 66 on Prime Video. When a game is a national exclusive, the local channel, the local app and League Pass all go dark for it.

The national layer is not one map either. On NBC’s “Coast 2 Coast Tuesday,” the Eastern and Central NBC stations typically carry one game, and Mountain and Pacific stations carry a different one. Both stream nationally on Peacock. NBC’s own advice to viewers is to check local listings each week. A national broadcast, in other words, can still depend on the viewer’s time zone.

Exposure is also very uneven. The Nets have two national games all season. Across the river, the Knicks have more than 30. Two teams in one city have very different answers to how often “local” applies at all.

The two NBA games in Europe this season, Spurs vs. Pelicans in Paris on Jan. 14 and in Manchester on Jan. 17, are both Prime Video games in the US. For a European reader, that is the opposite of intuition: the game is played abroad, and the US answer is still set by the national deal.

Why this season is a patch, not a plan

The deals that replaced FanDuel Sports Network were mostly written to be short. In April the league told the affected teams to look for one-year deals or deals with exits, according to Sports Business Journal. The NBA is planning a league-run local streaming hub, which SBJ reported the league expects to launch for the 2027-28 season.

So the map above has a shelf life of about one season. The local answer for a third of the league is likely to change again next October, and the national answer will keep changing week by week until then.

What this means for “where to watch” data

For an NBA game this season, “where can I watch it?” depends on three things a fixture list does not contain: which tier of the local deal the game sits in, which territory the viewer is standing in, and whether a national window, sometimes a regional one, overrides both that night.

The schedule was published in August. Some of the local answers were announced in October, the last of them six days before opening night.

That is the gap broadcast data has to close: game by game, territory by territory, and again every time a deal changes. If your platform needs to answer it for basketball fans, that is the dataset we maintain. Get in touch.