Report: Nets nearing agreement to restructure TV deal with YES Network
The Brooklyn Nets have been running on an unprecedented deficit in recent years under owner Mikhail Prokhorov, but they continue to take steps toward inching back into the green.
Cost-cutting measures like buying out point guard Deron Williams and narrowly ducking the luxury tax, combined with the impending influx of national TV money (and subsequent raising of the league's tax threshold), have the Nets poised to begin turning a profit in the near future, which would help facilitate a long-rumored attempted sale of the franchise.
A further financial boon the Nets are reportedly angling for is a significant increase in local TV money starting in the 2017-18 season, a year after the NBA's new national media rights deal kicks in.
From the Sports Business Journal, via Nets Daily:
The Nets used a contractual "reset" that occurs every five years to get YES Network's majority owner Fox Sports to increase its rights fee to an annual average of around $40 million, starting with 2017-18 season, according to sources.
The Nets have struggled with TV ratings since relocating to Brooklyn in 2012, and under the terms of their current deal with YES, the team reportedly pulls in scarcely more money than the lowly, small-market Minnesota Timberwolves.
No date has been set for closing a restructured deal, but the two sides will go to arbitration if an agreement isn't reached by December, according to Nets Daily.
The proposed agreement would see YES retain all TV broadcast and digital media rights to the Nets programming, while also shortening the deal, which runs through the 2031-32 season. A new deal would still reportedly run well into the 2020s.
- With h/t to PBT