The NBA filed a motion late Friday to dismiss the lawsuit brought by Warner Bros. Discovery Inc., which accuses the league of breaching contract by not allowing WBD to exercise an equal offer for a new media rights deal and instead moving forward with a deal with Amazon.
The NBA filed 28 pages of documents and supporting documents asking the court to dismiss the lawsuit, meaning it cannot be refiled in the future.
“TBS elected not to accept NBCUniversal’s offer, which would have allowed TBS to continue broadcasting games through its TNT linear cable network,” the league wrote. “Instead, TBS insisted on accepting Amazon’s less expensive offer, but only after amending it to include traditional streaming rights and making numerous other substantive changes.”
Amazon’s offer was approximately $1.8 billion per year, while NBC’s offer was approximately $2.45 billion per year.
The league said Warner Bros. Discovery “made substantive revisions to eight of the 27 sections of Amazon’s offer (including revisions to 22 different subsections), changed 11 defined terms used a total of approximately 100 times, deleted approximately 300 words, and added more than 270 new words, significantly altering the parties’ rights and obligations in the process.”
“Far from accepting each term of Amazon’s proposal, TBS’s revised proposal was a counteroffer that the NBA was free to reject,” NBA lawyers argued.
